"I have spent decades looking for examples of Google putting its enormous thumb on the scale to censor or amplify certain results, and it hadn’t even occurred to me that Google just flat out deletes queries and replaces them with ones that monetize better.”
Absolutely bonkers. The Google antitrust trial discovered that Google is actually *changing user queries* in order to generate results that give more sponsored ads
https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/
@peterbutler Hm. This is certainly interesting.
Honestly though, I'm somewhat less outraged about this than the author of the article apparently expects me to be, and more just disappointed. I mean, Google (or any search service) provides an algorithm that takes in search terms and other info and produces search results, and what I care about as a user is how well those results get me the information or website I'm looking for. How the algorithm works is kind of irrelevant to me (at least, I don't care how the purely computational part of the algorithm works, although I might care about non-computational parts like if it's sending all my search activity to the NSA). If part of the algorithm internally happens to involve replacing one search query with another, that doesn't matter. (1/2)
@peterbutler So from the user's perspective, what matters here is that Google has implemented an algorithm that increases their ad revenue at the expense of search result quality. Certainly a loss for consumers, but it'd be far from the first time a company offers a product that sacrifices quality to allow them to make more money, even coming from a company that has a monopoly. In most other contexts we seem to just accept that as something that happens in capitalism. I see this as largely the same situation.
Not saying consumers shouldn't have negative feelings about this, it's just that what Google is doing is not out of line with what a lot of other companies do. Or at least it seems so based on the article. (2/2)
Peter Butler
David Zaslavsky