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.
  • BilliamEnglish
    70•1 year ago

    I’ve said (and read) it before: the concept of a great search engine is exactly at odds with advertising. A good search engine gives accurate results fast, while the purpose of advertising is to show users what advertisers pay to show them. In other words, it’s the difference between showing users what they want to see, versus showing users what advertisers want them to see.

    Google knows that the more irrelevant results it returns, the longer you spend looking, which translates into more opportunities to show ads.

    • Bernie EcclestonedEnglish
      16•1 year ago

      I’ve just done the same search as in the article on Chrome, Firefox and DuckDuckGo

      Google served 5 ads before showing me M&S’ website

      DDG showed me an ad for Temu then M&S’ website

      Firefox showed me no ad, thanks ublock, and straight to M&S’ website

    • @GeekyNerdyNerd@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      9•1 year ago

      Google knows that the more irrelevant results it returns, the longer you spend looking, which translates into more opportunities to show ads.

      Which is ironic, as Google only managed to get as far as they did by doing the exact opposite in an era where Alta Vista and the small handful of other OG search engines were focused on maximizing revenue via ads.

      Google has become that which they sought to destroy.

  • @cerement@slrpnk.netEnglish
    48•1 year ago

    from the company that now completely ignores all the search syntax they trained us on – when -, +, "..." actually meant something

    • DontMakeMoreBabies
      12•1 year ago

      I’ve switched to DDG because Google results are literal garbage, but I’ll try Bing if it’s actually working.

      • @Swordinferno@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4•1 year ago

        DDG scrapes their results from Bing, so you are effectively already using Bing. I had to stop using DDG because it plugs MSN and other Microsoft websites so hard.

    • @psychothumbs@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      7•1 year ago

      Yeah I’m pretty much exclusively on DuckDuckGo these days, which is partially based on Bing but with a lot more privacy, and never really have any trouble.

    • Neato
      5•1 year ago

      or it’s forum results from 2010. Nevermind I’ve explicitly asked for 2022, 23.

      I wish I could do the opposite. Sometimes there’s a new article about something and I want to search its history or find an article about it from a year ago to see what people were saying then. It’s all but impossible to find anything that isn’t trending. I know the info is there but no search engine I’ve used allows me to see it.

      When you mean using GPT, you mean you pull that drop-down from the top and talk to the AI? How do you know the info you are getting is accurate? AI has had a terrible track record of just regurgitating popular posts or making things up and AI can mask where the info came from, lending it an air of authority to what might be forum speculation.

  • @Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    26•1 year ago

    Google always seems to default to thinking that I am looking to buy something. It’s very nauseating. This is what Google shopping was supposed to be for. Search should be completely separated from shopping.

  • @CosmoNova@feddit.deEnglish
    10•1 year ago

    Google‘s ‚auto complete‘ is driving me nuts sometimes and it‘s also prevalent on Youtube. I mean just scrolling through completely unrelated suggestions in Youtube‘s search results tells you how little they care to show you what you actually want and rather something that makes them more money one way or another. But the direct fiddling with actual search quarries is just malpractice for a search engine.

  • @lloram239@feddit.deEnglish
    5•1 year ago

    And yet their shopping search engine is still trash. It kind of surprises me that nobody has managed to make a good product search engine in all those years, they are always full of duplicates of the same product, fail to group related products together, missing tons of products, fail to take account of shipping costs, lack advanced search options, lack reviews and whatever. Steam with its user tag and reviews is reasonably good, but obviously just limited to just Steam games itself.

    • @psychothumbs@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      I think shopping part of google search has the same problems as the rest of it just more so - there is a fundamental disconnect between searchers wanting neutral results and producers paying google to direct customers to their products. The more ability you have to control your search the less ability they have to sell highly ranked search results to advertisers.

    • DeebsterEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      As I was reading the article, I was thinking how glad I was that I switched - I am on the yearly plan now because I’m not going back to “free” search engines.

      • ParadoxEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        I’m on the yearly ultimate or whatever they called it. My wife is interested too, but they don’t have an equivalent to the ultimate in the family package (yet), so she just sticks with bing.

  • 👍Maximum Derek👍English
    3•1 year ago

    When I first switched off gmail there started to be a ton of stories that talked about Google doing terrible things with gmail. Now that I’ve recently given up Google search I’m seeing stories like this.

    Either I have Spidey-sense for Google’s skeletons getting exposed or it’s that thing where you buy a car then see the same model everywhere. But in my case it’s like I sold a car and now see the same model everywhere, on the side of the road with the engine on fire.

    • @1984@lemmy.todayEnglish
      5•1 year ago

      Google was always like this (ok maybe not in the beginning but for the last decade at the very least). For some reason now, more media sources started writing negative things about Google, so it seems they are worse now, but they are just as they always were.

      Before you had personal blogs saying the same thing but people don’t take those as seriously.

      Maybe Microsoft started paying media sources to finally make a PR push to limit Googles enormous power. Microsoft wants to to the same thing though.