Testimony during Google’s antitrust case revealed that the company may be altering billions of queries a day to generate results that will get you to buy more stuff.
This is a highly concerning allegation, and it does explain some interesting results I’ve noticed lately. I’ve wondered why, especially when searching for products, an expected result isn’t there unless I invoke it by name. I’d chalked it up to their competition having more mindshare and thus a higher page rank score. Now I’m not so sure.
Worse, it somewhat supports claims that the far-right has been making, although those claims still completely miss the mark.
What annoys me most is that you’ll get that product carousel at the top of sponsored products that aren’t what you want, then 3 or 4 results of sponsored links, then maybe you get the actual thing in the 5th real result.
This is a highly concerning allegation, and it does explain some interesting results I’ve noticed lately. I’ve wondered why, especially when searching for products, an expected result isn’t there unless I invoke it by name. I’d chalked it up to their competition having more mindshare and thus a higher page rank score. Now I’m not so sure.
Worse, it somewhat supports claims that the far-right has been making, although those claims still completely miss the mark.
What annoys me most is that you’ll get that product carousel at the top of sponsored products that aren’t what you want, then 3 or 4 results of sponsored links, then maybe you get the actual thing in the 5th real result.
It’s a really bad search experience.