How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet
www.wired.com
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.
  • 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.
  • ijeffOPMEnglish
    2•9 months ago

    It makes me wonder what a non-profit search engine would look like. One that’s not necessarily focused on privacy so it can tailor results but without the commercialization.

    • LungEnglish
      1•9 months ago

      overall problem is result tailoring is a big data / ai kind of problem. The more you know about the person, the better you can do it. So the class of solution should be something like

      • you fill out a personality quiz that just manually fills out your interests
      • the engine only uses context per day or session, then forgets. So if I’m searching about plumbing, it’ll give me related stuff, but only for that day
      • or you somehow download a big compressed database (may not be feasible) and then run some open source software locally to search it