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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impacting users’ ability to access unbiased information.
I never like the implication that "unbiased" or "objective" info/searches exist. They don't. Don't get me wrong, google is 100% in the wrong here and is deliberately putting their thumb on the scale in a very certain way. But yeah, the "unbiased" thing always nags at me lol
I think it's appropriate in terms of product review searches.
But what is an unbiased result? What does that look like?
Reviews that don't involve affiliate links or products provided by the company.
How do you weight the different reviews that meet this criteria? Plenty of reviews don't involve either.
At some point you have to pick and choose. If it's "truly" random, then the search is meaningless. If it's curated/weighted, then it's biased.
The challenge is in elevating outright paid sponsorship and affiliate material above actual reviews.
It would be nice if we could choose our bias. Sometimes, we might want it biased towards scientific sources, sometimes, towards user-generated content, sometimes towards institutional sites, etc.