Some information coming out of the antitrust lawsuit against Google:
"Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here’s how it works. Say you search for “children’s clothing.” Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear,” making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren’t searching for at all. It’s not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don’t get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape.
Why would Google want to do this? First, the generated results to the latter query are more likely to be shopping-oriented, triggering your subsequent behavior much like the candy display at a grocery store’s checkout. Second, that latter query will automatically generate the keyword ads placed on the search engine results page by stores like TJ Maxx, which pay Google every time you click on them. In short, it's a guaranteed way to line Google’s pockets."
https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/
@b4c50e1b
I moved to DuckDuckGo a while ago, not for ideological reasons, but simply because it gives me, more often, what I am looking for.
One day I complained loudly at home that I was searching for maths related things, but was getting adverts for socks, and my young son demonstrated to me that DuckDuckGo gave me what I wanted.
@b4c50e1b @b92dcc07 has been chronicling Google's #enshittification for a while, but this is extreme even by those standards
@b4c50e1b
You can opt out and stop using their search engine. There are several that actively go out of their way not to abuse their users, I use and recommend Qwant
@b4c50e1b I'm not seeing anything anywhere in that article that says what evidence there is for its incendiary claims. The author mentions something that "momentarily flashed on a projector" and quotes the words "semantic matching", and ... so far as I can see, that's it?
I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that Google is doing what the article alleges, or some other equally nefarious thing, but I'm having trouble thinking what could possibly (still less _plausibly_) have been on that slide, short and clear enough to be read when merely "momentarily flashed", that would justify the claims in the article.
Am I missing something here? Can anyone suggest what might actually have been on the slide? Or why the author of the article is so very vague about it?
@b4c50e1b not just “someone”, an executive at duck duck go.
@b4c50e1b Has anyone seen any actual evidence of this supposed behaviour by Google search? My own (admittedly limited) testing doesn't show anything like this, and I'm unable to find any independent corroboration. The referenced article is an opinion piece, written by someone who spent years competing directly with Google search, about "a key exhibit momentarily flashed on a projector." Seems a bit shaky.
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