I've been really frustrated by how the most common search engines are utterly useless recently and so I've been searching for lesser known but more reliable, safe, and unbiased search engines. I search for a lot of different things on each engine to test out how good they are, and one of the things I've been searching for to test their biases is the lone word, "Gaza." I mostly look at the general search results page and the news page on engines for that term to help determine how biased they seem to be. I finished doing that on one engine and was going to move on to see how robust the image searching on that search engine was so I clicked the image button...
Every image for pages and pages was just of devastation and suffering. Ruins everywhere, the injured being treated in crowded hospital wards, parents grandparents and older siblings carrying small children through rubble filled streets, plumes of smoke following bombings, people praying in the midst of the destruction, massive craters blasted in the ground within housing complexes, rows of bodies wrapped in sheets, I could go on... After about a dozen pages of image results I found an image of a map of Israel and Gaza here or there, and there would be the odd picture of Israeli tanks or soldiers making their way through the desolate streets from time to time, but it was still almost entirely a visual record of the devastation and suffering happening to the Palestinian people. The point is, there were no pictures available of Gaza that show what it looked like before, unless you load through DOZENS of pages and even then you only find a picture every couple of pages that shows the "before" and half of them are comparison pictures showing the before AND after. I attempted to add years to the search alongside the name "Gaza" and the results barely changed. There were a few more images of bombs exploding within villages and cities that were not already reduced to rubble, that's about it.
This land used to be, even while under occupation, brimming with life and beauty. I've seen the pictures before. They DID exist. But due to the variables that determine search relevance, that visible online history has been effectively wiped out by the sheer deluge of images of this genocide. Thinking that maybe it was just a fluke of that new search engine I was testing I decided to test DDG, Google, bing, and Yahoo for images as well. Same results. It is now extremely difficult to find images of Gaza that show a land NOT in utter ruin.
It's heartbreaking that the home of over two million people has been reduced to images solely of the people's suffering... but it also gives me a gross feeling kind of hope. Any young person who wants to know more about the land that this "conflict" is taking place in will have their image searches immediately met with the unequivocal truth of the matter. A search for Gaza returns nothing but destruction, carnage, and despair... a search for Israel, instead, returns images of beautiful architecture and landscapes and the ubiquitous images of sunbeams shining down through clouds onto the land or onto the Israeli flag...