Then I searched for a string of text on my brand new website to see how quickly the search engines would pick it up. I did this search less than 24 hours after the site went live. Neither the site nor the text string had anything to do with politics. I ran the identical search on each of the six search engines.
Four of the search engines returned my website as the first result. The fifth one returned it as the fourth result, and Google did not contain my website at all on the first page of results. I did not check subsequent pages.
My conclusion is the same as another poster's: Google doesn't show you what you want to find, it shows you what Google wants you to look at.
The search engines I most commonly use are duckduckgo and dogpile.
I didn’t know dogpile was still around. I’ll have to check them out.
Wow. I had forgotten about them. I just typed "dogpile search engine" into Goodsearch (it's powered by Yahoo). I had to scroll down to the seventh result before I got to the actual Dogpile web address. As you and others have stated, several search engines show us what THEY want us to see, not what we asked for.
I like duckduckgo as you do. Will have to try dogpile again.