Why is Google burying the QAnon source data?

The search rank for the QAnon source data websites is very different on Google to other search engines. This is troubling.

Why is Google burying the QAnon source data?

“And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.”
— 1984, George Orwell

Humour me for a moment. Imagine you’re from the political left, and everything you know about QAnon comes from mainstream media sources. A delinquent friend into the Q conspiracy theory sends you Trump’s latest official campaign video, and once you’ve stopped rolling your eyes, you agree to take a look.

QAnon in Trump's official campaign video

How odd! Someone right smack in the middle of the screen is wearing a Q-themed top. And it’s at the 55 second mark, which your crazy Q friends tells you is military-speak — “5:5” — for “loud and clear”. You shrug your shoulders and make a note to take a look to see what all the fuss is about.

You go to Google… and all you can find are mainstream media hit pieces on QAnon. So you give up looking further. It can’t be that important. After all, it’s just a debunked silly conspiracy theory, no?


This isn’t a hypothetical story. Before I present you with some data on how Google is hiding the Q drop source data, here is a comment I received today:

Google is the reason it took me an extra year or two to wake up. I was searching with all the right words and ideas on Google but not receiving results. I gave up for a while but came back for more when Jeffrey Epstein was arrested in June. By June 10 I was awake.

Now, being one of those annoyingly scientific types, I am quite insistent that before I make up my mind on anything, I’ll look at the source data, use diligent reasoning, and think independently. In the context of Q, the first of these would imply going to one of two popular websites that aggregate the Q drops, which are scattered around 4chan, 8chan, and 8kun.

I did a search for “qanon” and compared the rankings of qanon.pub and qmap.pub across multiple search engines.

qanon.pub search rank:

  • Bing – 1
  • Yahoo – 1
  • Quant – 3
  • DuckDuckGo – 1
  • Yandex – 3
  • Yippy* – 2
  • Google – 100
    (*IBM Watson)

qmap.pub search rank:

  • Bing – 1 (as sub result)
  • Yahoo – not in first 20 pages
  • Quant – 4
  • DuckDuckGo – 8
  • Yandex – 17
  • Yippy – 9
  • Google – 128

There is an odd anomaly of Yahoo not listing qmap.pub, when qanon.pub is the top result. (Curiously, Twitter censors qmap.pub if you try to tweet it from their mobile client.) Whatever. The picture is beyond doubt: Google shows you the mainstream media’s “official narrative”, and buries the source data you need to think for yourself.

Regardless of your political outlook, this ability to “memory hole” important data is troubling. As another commenter notes (hidden behind Twitter’s censorship trick of “show more results”):

Google buried Tulsi Gabbard when they wanted to silence her. She was the most googled candidate after she cut the others to ribbons in the debate. But google searches for her got buried 9 pages deep. Imagine what they’re doing to the Q community searches!

Google is not your friend, no matter what you think of Q or Trump.