- 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.
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.
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