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How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet - WIRED

cross-posted from !google

  • 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.
Ordoviz ,
@Ordoviz@lemmy.ml avatar

Wired has removed the story because it “does not meet [their] editorial standards”.

ijeff OP ,
@ijeff@lemdro.id avatar

Interesting… thanks for flagging!

WeLoveCastingSpellz ,

I have been using startpage which is closed source and uses google results. Loved using it for so long but I want to switch any recommendations that aren’t Kagi(too expensive for me) or DDG(I heard that theye were tempering with the results sometime ago)?

sculd ,

I FINALLY understand why even putting quotation in my search queries still result in lots of irrelevant results!!!

Because Google isn’t even searching for the exact input!! They just changed the input!! Ridiculous!!!

acastcandream ,

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

ijeff OP ,
@ijeff@lemdro.id avatar

I think it’s appropriate in terms of product review searches.

acastcandream ,

But what is an unbiased result? What does that look like?

ijeff OP ,
@ijeff@lemdro.id avatar

Reviews that don’t involve affiliate links or products provided by the company.

acastcandream ,

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.

ijeff OP ,
@ijeff@lemdro.id avatar

The challenge is in elevating outright paid sponsorship and affiliate material above actual reviews.

eumesmo ,

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.

CephalonKappa ,

I’ve beem very happy after switching to kagi.

ijeff OP ,
@ijeff@lemdro.id avatar

Which plan are you on?

CephalonKappa ,

Im using the new 10€ for unlimeted searches plan.

jherazob ,
@jherazob@beehaw.org avatar

I liked Cory Doctorow’s blog post on this issue

blindsight ,

I had already read up on this and still read that to the end. Very clearly written and includes lots of receipts.

Thanks for posting.

sculd ,

This is such a good article.

sphere_au ,

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.

renard_roux ,

Friendly reminder that Brave CEO donated to Prop 8, Brave was founded with seed money from right-wing-fanboy-billionaire Peter Thiel, Brave injected their own referral codes into links, Brave replaced page ads and injected their own, and tons of other delightful shit.

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.

astraeus ,
@astraeus@programming.dev avatar

In this context the name makes a lot of sense

renard_roux ,

You mean because it describes the users, and not the product? 😅

astraeus ,
@astraeus@programming.dev avatar

The users, the business model, the people who think they’ll get away with their evil schemes

renard_roux ,

Even better 😁

tlf ,

I felt that change. Everytime i used it the results in the suggestion box had nothing to do with what I was searching for.

Unsustainable ,
@Unsustainable@lemmy.today avatar

Do people still use Google search? Maybe I don’t get out much, but idk anyone that uses Google search.

ijeff OP ,
@ijeff@lemdro.id avatar

What do folks in your circle use? I’m the only person I know IRL who sometimes doesn’t use Google.

Unsustainable ,
@Unsustainable@lemmy.today avatar

I mainly use Searx, MetaGer, and DDG. Most of the people I know are not fans of Google. I’m a little more privacy conscious than most of my friends, though. Most of them have FB and IG accounts. I don’t post anything on social media unless it’s as anonymous as it can be.

eumesmo ,

Do people still use Google search?

Google literally has more than 90% ofthre global marketshare gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

Unsustainable ,
@Unsustainable@lemmy.today avatar

That site won’t open. How are they measuring the usage, since the privacy conscious search engines don’t track people?

doboprobodyne ,

Nice to see hamstring themselves; they're seen as a engine benchmark, so this makes it easier for (which uses to provide it's search answers, if I understand correctly) to edge up on them in the rankings...

thingsiplay ,
@thingsiplay@kbin.social avatar

It will get worse when Google replaces its old engine with an AI powered one. Because nobody knows what the AI does at that point, as it is not a simple search term search the web anymore, but explicitly opinionated results.

astraeus ,
@astraeus@programming.dev avatar

Google is like a big hairy troll living under the bridge, the internet. Everyone thought the troll was kind of nice, even if it was a big hairy troll, because it usually let people cross the bridge for free. This court case is dragging out all the dead bodies and displaying them for the villagers to see.

acastcandream ,

What we didn’t see was it pickpocketing us every time we crossed.

that_one_guy ,

I wonder what the reaction will be from the companies hiring Google’s advertising services. On the one hand, Google is clearly ensuring that they get as much money out of the deal as possible, but it also must lead to more people seeing the advertised brand, likely even encouraging it’s sales. The author suggests that this is a bad deal for companies working with Google, as well as Google’s users, but I can’t help but think that the companies purchasing ads from Google are coming out ahead on this one.

LallyLuckFarm ,

Anecdotally, I have a generally negative perception of the brands placed in the way of actual search results. They’re rarely relevant to my actual wants or needs, let alone the search terms, and it colors my expectations that they’d be capable of helping me even if I did want their products or services given the low QC on where their ads are shown.

blindsight , (edited )

Advertisers lose because they’re only paying to try to snipe each other’s customers when directly searching for brand names. They could pay to advertise on the more generic search phrases, but it’s more likely to convert a user into a sale if they’re ready to buy something and googling a competitor’s company name to go to their website.

For users just looking for general information, the company paid for an ad that was less likely to convert to a sale. And it fucks their analytics, too, since there’s no indication to them that users didn’t even search for the key term they’re paying to advertise with.

Crotaro ,

This would explain why I feel like Google results have rarely been high quality unless I’m just trying to scratch at the surface of a topic or include “reddit” at the end of my search term.

stealth_cookies ,

Even though results have gotten worse, every time I’ve tried another search engine the results have been even worse than Google.

dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Have you tried Kagi? It’s a paid service (which is good for people that don’t like ads) and the results seem pretty good. They have a trial plan where you can do 100 searches. Where possible, it prioritises small sites that don’t always appear in Google results at all, and it has far less SEO spam than Google.

macallik ,

It feels like every other post on privacy and technology is someone pushing the (paid) search engine Kagi nowadays...

dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

I’m not affiliated with Kagi or anything, it’s just refreshing to have a fresh approach to search engines that doesn’t involve using advertising to pay for it. I haven’t actually paid for a plan yet, but I do have a trial account, and it seems like a pretty good product.

Linssiili ,

Probably, since every other post is about search engines, and many of us have been cursing the ever-worsening search results from google, with no real alternative (that actually provides better results than google).

Now that there is finally an ad-free product that performs like Google did 5-10 years ago, of course, I want others to have the same experience and not get frustrated when they can’t find the information they’re seeking.

YuzuDrink ,
@YuzuDrink@beehaw.org avatar

I really need to try them and see how many searches I actually use. Even their higher paid tiers seem like way too few searches to me. But I have no actual idea.

dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

I would have agreed in the past, but they have an unlimited plan for $10/month now, which is why I’m more interested.

blindsight , (edited )

I get that search is expensive to run, but $120 USD/yr is a lot.

Maybe it’s worth cancelling something to pay for it, but idk. I won’t even look at metered tiers. Knowing my scarcity aversion, I’d never use it. I didn’t use a single Neeva trial search since I was hoarding them like Max Ethers from Final Fantasy.

dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Yeah. It’s definitely expensive, which is why I haven’t signed up for a subscription yet. Still thinking about it.

acastcandream ,

That’s $120/yr is worth less to me than my privacy and desire to decouple from google tbh

tlf ,

Thank you for the recommendation, if a product delivers what i expect for it’s price I’m gonna be using it. The trial searches will hopefully help me evaluate that

Crotaro ,

Yes, that’s unfortunately true, too. It probably comes with how sites will try to optimise as much as possible for search engines to find them, even if it means that it’s no longer useful (like those posts on social media that include every conceivable tag instead of the ones that actually fit thematically to the post)

There’s this project for a paid search engine, Kagi, that tries to make results more useful again by not needing to favour advertisements. I haven’t tested their trial offer too much because I keep forgetting it exists, so I cannot say how much better the results really are, yet.

Edit: Big lol, I just read the other replies in this comment chain and yeah I guess by now you are aware of this Kagi project hah.

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