Following on yesterday's "WTF? Google Search Has Implemented "Infinite Scroll" In the U.S. (GOOG; EVIL)".
I have since been informed that a) infinite scroll had already been rolled out for mobile and b) that even prior to infinite scroll Google had been limiting the number of results you would get to see for a general search—as opposed to something specific such as The Blind Spot, where the GOOG will deliver you to Izzy's domain as the second result.
Not using Google search for either work or non-work (though sometimes for news) I was unaware of the two changes that had already been thrust upon the intrepid searcher of truth and/or cat videos.
I was aware that prior to the numerical limitation Google had been skewing results toward whatever suited their ideological fancy, links after the jump.
From The New Yorker, March 10 2022:
The search engine has made up so much of our online experience for so long that it can be hard to imagine something better.
When I recently Googled “best toaster” on my phone, thinking about replacing the appliance in my apartment kitchen, the search immediately yielded a carrousel of images of products from various high-design brands: Balmuda, Hay, Smeg. (Guilty: I had definitely searched for the Japanese Balmuda’s steam-enabled toasters before.) Lower down on the results page were ads for online retailers such as Amazon and Wayfair, then another carrousel of “Popular Toasters” with user-review metrics, then a list of suggested queries under the heading “People also ask.” (“Is it worth buying an expensive toaster?” “You can’t gain much beyond the $100 models,” an answer pulled from CNET reads.) Swiping down further, I reached aggregated listicles clearly designed to exploit Google’s search algorithm and profit from affiliate marketing: toaster tips from Good Housekeeping, the “4 best toaster ovens of 2022” from Wirecutter. Further down still was a map of toasters that could be purchased in physical proximity to my apartment. I felt lost among the suggestions, awash in information and yet compelled by none of it.
This kind of cluttered onslaught of homogenous e-commerce options is what recently prompted Dmitri Brereton, a twenty-six-year-old engineer at a recruiting-software company in San Francisco, to publish a blog post titled “Google Search Is Dying.” When it comes to product reviews or recipes, Brereton argued, results from Google’s search engine “have gone to shit.” Rather than settling for the default, those who want to know what a “genuine real-life human being” thinks of a certain product have learned work-arounds, such as adding “Reddit” to their searches to bring up relevant threads on that platform. On Reddit’s “Buy It for Life” forum, for instance, they’ll find users showing off a Soviet-era toaster, a restored vintage Sunbeam, and other toasters to “grow old with,” as one put it. Brereton’s post–which ended “Google is dead. Long live Google + ‘site:reddit.com’ ”—became the No. 10 most upvoted link ever on the tech-industry discussion board Hacker News. No. 11 is a complaint about Google’s search results looking too similar to its ads, while No. 12 is a link to an alternative, indie search engine. Clearly, others share Brereton’s sense of search-engine discontentment.
Brereton told me recently that his frustration began in late 2020. “I was browsing the Internet one day, and I began to feel like something was just off,” he said. “A lot of the content doesn’t feel authentic—it doesn’t feel real.” He sounded bemused by the runaway popularity of his post, which was part of a personal research project on how information is organized online. Better information could be found on social media, discussion boards, and small-scale personal blogs, but Google Search was deprioritizing those platforms in favor of corporate Web sites, which could afford the money and effort it takes to optimize for Google’s search algorithm. “The authentic Web” seemed hidden, Brereton said. “The algorithms tell us what to read.”
Google Search accounts for around eighty-five per cent of the global search-engine market. It has made up so much of our online experience for so long that it can be hard to envision anything different. The Google Search page today looks largely the same as it did when it first launched, in 1998: blue links against an austere white background. From the beginning, the company’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, recognized the tension between useful search results and profitable ones. “The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users,” they wrote as Stanford students, in a 1998 paper. Yet ads were introduced in 2000 and have proliferated ever since. Links to Web sites have fallen down search-result pages, replaced by Google’s “Quick Answers,” which borrow bits of text from sites so that users don’t even need to click. Decades of search-engine optimization have resulted in content that is formulated not to inform readers but to rank prominently on Google pages. That might be one reason that my toaster results felt so redundant: each site is attempting to solve the same algorithmic equation.
Gabriel Weinberg, the C.E.O. of the privacy-focussed search-engine company DuckDuckGo, cited three other sources of dissatisfaction with Google Search. The first is the company’s practice of tracking user behavior, which drives the kind of creepy, chasing-you-around-the-Internet advertising that Google profits from. The second is Google prioritizing its own services in search results, by, for instance, answering a travel query with Quick Answers pulled from Google Places instead of from a richer, more social source such as Tripadvisor. Lastly, Weinberg argued, users are simply tired of Google’s dominance over their experience of the Internet. Google is reportedly paying Apple upward of fifteen billion dollars a year to remain the default search engine on iPhones. On Google’s own Android phone, changing one’s preferred search engine requires a cumbersome settings adjustment, and pop-up messages along the way urge the user to switch back to Google. “Most people have never chosen their search engine,” Weinberg said.
DuckDuckGo, which doesn’t engage in any user tracking, has in the past year doubled both its estimated user count, from fifty million to a hundred million, and its search traffic, from 1.5 billion to three billion queries a month. It serves ads based only on users’ search terms rather than on their past behavioral patterns. According to Weinberg, each time you search on DuckDuckGo, “it’s as if you’re there for the first time.” In reality, though, choosing among existing search engines has only a modest impact on one’s results, because all of the major engines operate based on a template established by Google’s original web crawler and PageRank technologies. DuckDuckGo, for instance, largely leverages the search algorithm of Microsoft’s product Bing. A DuckDuckGo search for “best toaster” surfaces more or less the same results on my phone as Google, with ads, sale alerts, and affiliate-marketing listicles. (The Times recently reported that DuckDuckGo has become popular among conspiracy theorists who believe that Google’s results are censored, but DuckDuckGo disputes that it turns up any more controversial content than Google.)
Viktor Lofgren, a Swedish software developer and consultant who created his own indie search engine called Marginalia, told me, “One part of the sameyness is that recommendation and prediction algorithms often seem to work almost too well.” Marginalia, which Lofgren started working on a year ago, is a bare-bones Web site run entirely from a computer in his living room. The search engine’s stated mission is to “show you sites you perhaps weren’t aware of.”...
....MUCH MORE
If interested see "To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public" (GOOG)":The author, Dr. Robert Epstein is the former editor-in-chief at Psychology Today, search-engine researcher, Huffington Post contributor etc.
From Bloomberg Businessweek, July 15, 2019:....
And: "If You Liked Big Brother, Meet Google's Big MUM"
As we said earlier, Google is an ad-monger.
And the idea that a business that hustles ads can choose what I, you, anyone gets to see on the internet is getting a bit old. Let them continue to sell ads but make the index that underlies the search engine a public utility.....
- "Google to Donate Its Search Engine to the American Public" (GOOG)
- "The Open Secret of Google Search"
- More On Google's Manipulation of Search Results (GOOG)
- "How Google Interferes With Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results" (GOOG; EVIL)
- Repost: "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas"
- Valuing, Disaggregating (and perhaps dismembering) Alphabet (GOOG)
