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How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet - WIRED

  • 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.
3 comments

  • Sounds like the exact basis for the Amazon antitrust case. That they are fucking up Amazon search for the sake of pushing more promoted content, and preventing the market from punishing them for the practice via monopoly. Govt doing the thing it's mainly for, we will see how it goes

    • 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

        • 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