How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet - WIRED
How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet - WIRED
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.
cross-posted from !google@lemdro.id
- Google may be altering billions of search queries daily to generate results that increase purchases.
- Testimony in an antitrust case revealed an internal Google slide about changes to its search algorithm, involving "semantic matching" to generate more commercial results.
- Google covertly changes user queries, substituting them with ones that generate more revenue for the company and display shopping-oriented results.
- This manipulation benefits Google's profits but harms search quality and raises advertiser costs.
- Despite legal challenges, Google's market dominance allows it to continue these practices, impacting users' ability to access unbiased information.
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Maybe this explains why the result quality is so terrible. I've found Brave Search to be surprisingly good, and even the likes of Metager/Mojeek to be better than they used to be relative to the big players. DDG is not too bad, but went noticeably downhill when Bing started introducing AI features - presumably since these are largely not included in DDG, the remaining original search mechanisms aren't as good.
I really feel like we'll be back to starting web rings and distributing bookmark files etc soon though. Relying more on community resources than faceless companies that will undoubtedly be looking for the next way to screw us over.
Brave has proved time and again that they're only trustworthy as long as whatever scheme they're working on isn't found out, and I can't imagine that there is any chance their search engine is any better.
If someone recommends Brave to you, you should ignore them, because they are wrong. Brave Browser is a mess of a software project, and the company building it is even worse.
In this context the name makes a lot of sense
You mean because it describes the users, and not the product? 😅
The users, the business model, the people who think they’ll get away with their evil schemes
Even better 😁