How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet
How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet
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 likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here’s how it works. Say you search for “children’s clothing.” Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear,” making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren’t searching for at all. It’s not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don’t get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape.
That sucks, but I argue that it's even worse. Not only do they tweak your results to make more money, but because google has a monopoly on web advertising, and (like it or not) advertising is the main internet funding model, google gets to decide whether or not your website gets to generate revenue at all. They literally have an approval process for serving ads, and it is responsible for the proliferation of LLM-generated blogspam. Here's a thing I wrote about it in which I tried to get my already-useful and high-quality website approved for ads, complete with a before and after approval, if you're curious. The after is a wreck.
That was a really well written, and more than mildly disturbing. Thanks? Yeah, thanks. I enjoyed it.
As someone with no web experience beyond using a string of notepad documents renamed into html files, this is both horrifying and completely fascinating. And very well written, like ya said.
Thank you for linking that excellent article. I’m finna share that with a bunch of people I know, because it’s wildly relevant to… lots of our lives.
Bonkers that it so suddenly is becoming this shitty
Well there's your problem. Google wants you to keep buying stuff, and you run an explicitly anti-capitalist blog. No ad revenue for you! /s
At this point Bing is starting to look pretty good.
That explains why I'm getting very odd specific results.
If accurate, this is a perfect example of the principle of ‘enshitification’ in action. That is, a good service or product becoming increasingly terrible as its development is continuously perverted by revenue related incentives.
Indeed, it has the hallmark feature of enshittification: screwing over one party (the users) to benefit another (the advertisers), followed by screwing over the second party as well. I'm sure no advertiser wants to waste their ad budget showing ads to people who haven't indicated any interest in their product; if they wanted to spend their money that way, they'd have bought ads on the more generic search terms instead.
>search
>search with search term in quotes
>search with search term in quotes with "Verbatim" mode enabled
>"search" "with" "each" "individual" "word" "of" "search" "term" "in" "quotes"
>double-check that "Verbatim" mode is still enabled (it is)
>click first link out of frustration, do a manual text search of the page for some keywords from your search term
>keywords from search term are not in top search result
>try to find a cached version of the page that that search engine appears to be referencing (waste 20 mins)
>cached version also doesn't contain any keywords from your search termiT's ThE aLgOrItHm
DDG gives me better search results now. I was arguing with someone a few years back about how Google gives better results when searching for programming answers. Not anymore. I pretty much only use Google out of desperation when other searches failed.
DDG also ignores "sentences marked by quotes" and sometimes -negative search terms.
People shouldn't be paying to opt out of ads, websites should be paying their users for what they're exploiting them for.
There's no pleasure in saying it, but Youtube proves that they are comfortable having their cake and eating it too.
Show users ads? Check.
Make people buy Premium to get out of seeing ads? Check.
Pay their content creators (who are also users)? Check.
Exploiting those creators with manipulative metrics and dashboards? Check.
Slowly paying them less and less, and sometimes not paying them at all? Check.
Slowly raising the price of Premium? Check.
Eliminate ad blockers? Check.
Bring down Google.
Sent from my Pixel phone...
Hey, if you run GrapheneOS, you have a better phone for privacy than every other major phone
I've heard. I'll do it, eventually. I'm told it's easy. I just haven't tried yet.
It's interesting how companies go through this loop of making a good product, making it even better until they become massive, then productively becoming shit and allowing the next company to come in and take their spot.
At this point Google is becoming more and more of a joke.
It’s called enshittification: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
I’m genuinely interested in trying out Kagi, it seems like a much better experience than whatever Google has to offer. With SEO being implemented everywhere it has gotten quite annoying that every time I search for something the first 5 results are some AI generated website that copies information from other sites.
Try it, you won't regret it! I find myself not even reaching for Google anymore.
I genuinely want to but I hate subscriptions simply because I’m poor at managing them which is why I’ve stuck with Google all this time.
I've recently found Qwant which I can recommend trying out. It's a European search engine with it's own index, independent from Google or Bing, privacy focused and free. The search results are pretty good, not sure if that's because it's just not affected by SEO focusing on Google.
The biggest issue I have with all of the alternatives is that Google Maps is just so much better than anything and integrating Maps results is extremely useful. Qwant integrates with OpenStreetMap but obviously that's just not the same.
Qwant is unfortunately owned by Axel Springer, truly one of the worst German companies in existence. They're the publisher of the most popular (and unfortunately highly politically biased, filled to the brim with dishonest exaggerations and occasionally straight-up lies) German newspaper Bild.
Whatever comes out of Qwant if it actually becomes popular, you can rest assured it will be nothing good.
Just use DuckDuckGo and be done with it.
Ah, shit... If only different search engines existed... /s
We all know that google is scummy/shit. Use something else instead of pretending to be shocked.
Good fucking luck getting at my wallet - I don't think I've ever bought anything from ads. Also, I avoid Google whenever possible.
No one is immune to ads.
hah nice try google i will do everything i can to get something for free
I think this is the 8th time this has been posted in the last week…