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Revelations from Google Antitrust trial - manipulation of search terms

How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet

https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/

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.

How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet

This is a major revelation from the trial.

The writer is a principal from Duck Duck Go.

Thought folks here might be interested.

2 comments

charonn0

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This would seem to explain, at least in part, the marked decline in search result quality, particularly for niche, low-result queries.

Nmyownworld

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This was why I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo as my go-to search engine a few years ago. My searches tend to be for falling down Internet rabbit holes in search of information on something of interest, not shopping. With Google, it had gotten to the point where searches gave me nothing but web site after web site with the same text copy/pasted, and a lot of Pintrest links. DuckDuckGo gives me a wider variety of web sites when I do a search, without needing to go through hundreds of links to the same text copy/pasted as the result.

beckerist

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To summarize, when you search "sneakers" on Google they sneakily replace your search term with Nike. They get paid by Nike by getting a cut of the ad revenue and then can also sell more product increasing their cut.

This hurts everyone except Google. Advertisers pay more for the click, consumers pay more, Google wins