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How Google alters search queries to get at your wallet
- Terr_ 3y agoPaywalled: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2Fstory%2Fgoogle-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results%2F https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2Fstory%...
- Exuma 3y agoThis is fucking awesome. 12ft is a hilarious name.
- atulvi 3y agosurprised pikachu face
- philipwhiuk 3y agoFeels like a good justification as to why the meme of "Google search query results are worse now" might actually be true.
- bombela 3y ago> This system reduces search engine quality for users and drives up advertiser expenses. Google can get away with it because these manipulations are imperceptible to the user and advertiser I sure have been noticing. At this point finding anything on the web feels like a lost cause. Besides duckduckgo (bing) which is not even that great either. What other option do we have?
- dmitrygr 3y agoTry Yandex and Kagi. First for breadth, second for depth
- eastbound 3y agoHow is Yandex, whose stock stopped being traded on the day of the Russian war, is still able to browse the entire Western universe? I’m not expressing a moral opinion, just surprised the West lets them do it.
- jacooper 3y agoBrave search is really good, its my main search engine, and i found it to be better than kagi with better AI integration. They are also integrating their own chat ai which is also privacy respecting.
- mjamesaustin 3y agoKagi search is a paid search engine that delivers higher quality results with no ads. I'm currently using the free trial (you get 100 searches for free) and enjoying it. https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/
- ethanbond 3y agoAlso been really enjoying Kagi, just converted to the $10/mo unlimited searches plan even before my trial ran out because it's such a breath of fresh air!
- charcircuit 3y agoSemantic search doesn't work by replacing words with synonyms. It just uses embeddings where queries using synonyms map to near points in a vector space. I doubt the actual queries would be manipulated and this author provides no proof other than "trust me bro."
- tedunangst 3y ago> 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 Wait. Is this example from the court testimony, or something the author made up?
- mvdtnz 3y agoIt sounds like the author is massively extrapolating from one slide that was only shown for a brief moment. A slide that we can't see. I am extremely skeptical that Google would make such an egregious substitution and I'd need to see some actual evidence for this.
- rodonn 3y agoI'm pretty sure the author is misinterpreting what she saw. Here is a thing that Google does do: The user searches for "children's clothing". An advertiser has created a search ad for the keyword "NIKOLAI-brand kidswear". If the advertiser has enabled "broad match" for their ad, then their ad will be eligible to be shown on the user's page in one of the advertising slots, even though there are no words in common between the user's query and the advertiser's keyword. Does anyone have evidence of Google manipulating the user's query to affect the organic search results shown to the user?
- jeffbee 3y agoQuery re-write is probably one of the top keys to search quality, at any search engine.
- eastbound 3y agoIs it, though? I reckon it’s commonly accepted. I reckon there are cases that can be highlighted. As I’m sure it’s possible to make the case that some trickle-down policies work. But in the end, plural forms or synonyms do not equate to the original word.
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- mbauman 3y agoIt is so extraordinarily valuable that folks like Megan Gray have been attending these trials. This story would be so much more compelling if we could also see that slide — but as a closed trial only those with the time and ability to actually go to the courthouse can see it. On the same day this slide was presented, she also tweeted: https://nitter.net/megangrA/status/1704244948378194289 https://nitter.net/megangrA/status/1704244948378194289 > I am so livid at what just happened re public access in the Google Search antitrust case right now that I don’t trust myself to tweet about it yet. Back later.
- Crash0v3rid3 3y agoMegan made so many assumptions in that article based on a slide and single quote that we can't even see. How about they actually provide some evidence before making such claims?
- the-rc 3y agoConcrete question: how does the query rewriting service talk to the ads DB to do what's alleged?
- mbauman 3y agoWe don’t know how many assumptions Megan made or even who was testifying and what they assumed or what evidence was presented in court. Yes, that’s problematic.
- w1nst0nsm1th 3y agoIt happens it is actually an evidence or key exhibit, in an anti-trust trial. She could be surely sued by Google by reporting false events. So I guess we can trust her reporting.
- Crash0v3rid3 3y agoWhat? Why should I trust her reporting? She gave us zero evidence.
- bloppe 3y agoNot defending Google, but this definitely reads like an article written by a lawyer with a vested interest in DuckDuckGo.
- jacooper 3y agoWhich isnt even independent! Its crazy to see people advocate for duckduckgo while brave search exists, is more privacy respecting and is actually independent.
- skilled 3y agoBrave sells the shit they scrape for AI training/inference... with no way to opt-out. How is that even remotely close to "privacy respecting"?
- worik 3y ago> Which isnt even independent! What do you mean? Who is pulling Duckduckgo's strings?
- jacooper 3y agoDuckduckgo is basically bing with another UI.
- hotnfresh 3y agoDDG also do in-line ads like Google, which are scummy as hell. I use them, but that single factor means I don’t like them.
- binkHN 3y agoI noticed the same with the search results in the Google Play Store. When you use search to try to find an app that matches your search term, you almost always get very unrelated apps in the results, and the only good explanation to it is that the unrelated apps that you're seeing provide more revenue to Google in comparison to the actual app that you want.
- SoftTalker 3y agoOr the "unrelated" apps have bought ads on a wide range of keywords so that they appear in many search results? Like when I search Craigslist for a BMW car and see ads for Mercedes and Audi cars because people posting those ads stick "BMW" in their ad copy. I flag those ads on the basis that they are abusing the search algorithm.
- binkHN 3y agoI'd love to say the unrelated apps bought ads, but that's not the case. The Play Store clearly denotes when there's an ad in your search results, but the vast majority of the unrelated apps have no ads.
- StillBored 3y agoHow much of that is just the vendors putting keywords in their search match dialogs to broaden their scope? The example I used to hit all the time, was searching for RDP in apple/android/etc app market spaces, the first few hits aren't even capable of RDP and are 3rd parties selling their proprietary screen sharing app rather than actual RDP clients. The app stores seem to have equated RDP or VNC with "screen sharing" and say ~80% of the results don't even support the protocol in question. Although, without my phone handy I just dumped it into the web based interface and it actually returned a half dozen RDP clients at the top, but then in the second ten, was netflix, facebook, ms teams and various other apps completely unrelated to even screen sharing. Looks like if you pay enough you can show up in every single query.
- eitland 3y agoSame happens in Apple App Store BTW: The first result in the results page is never what I search for. It is possibly just an ad but I can't remember it being market as one and it feels very off in what is supposed to be a premium paid offering as opposed to Googles ad financed ecosystem.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y agoThis company cannot die fast enough. Lets all hope OpenAI makes Google Search obsolete.
- vore 3y agoI don't think replacing one problem with a slightly different problem beholden to the same interests in the end solves anything.
- NegativeK 3y agoReplacing Google search, with all of its disgusting warts, with OpenAI's chatbot is a dystopian shitscape that I want no part in. ChatGPT has no citations.
- worik 3y agoDepends what you use it for. > ChatGPT has no citations. I use three programming languages every day, and lookup syntax details often Using Google (any search engine) returns acres of SEO driven garbage and astro turf Chat GPT has been a huge boon, essentially no B.S. No need for citations, the compiler keeps them honest. I used Bing search, via Skype for a while (it has been degraded recently IMO) it read web pages for me, summerised them, and returned links with it So I think LLM mediated search is a definite possibility for disrupting the enshitification of Internet search
- eitland 3y ago> No need for citations, the compiler keeps them honest. But in ldj[...]s preferred future Google is dead and when they are and Microsofts AI only gives you the answers and not the sources they can just keep cranking the prices and there is nothing one can do since you'll never know were they got it.
- eastbound 3y agoIt could be the cause why Google tries to monetize fast and now, at the expense of extremely fast enshitification.
- JohnFen 3y agoI have no idea if they do it to for ad reasons, but Google has been creatively interpreting search queries for a long while now. I think it's one of (maybe the primary) the reasons why Google search quality has fallen so much. It's not a huge stretch to think that while they're at it, they would take into account advertisers. Again, not saying they are -- only that it wouldn't be that shocking.
- mostlysimilar 3y agoWe now have direct evidence that the ads people interfere with the product to bolster sales at the expense of the users: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467 It's a near certainty this is happening in all parts of Google.
- tiltowait 3y agoI don’t know if it still does it, but an enormous pet peeve of mine was how Google would conflate NSTableView and UITableView in search results. They’re quite distinct!
- kbenson 3y agoI can't tell if you're trying to make some subtle point through sarcasm, because I don't know how those (which I understand to be Apple UI components) relate to searches and I'm not sure if that's because I just don't have the context or if them being unrelated is the point.
- distract8901 3y agoThe point is that they're unrelated, but Google "helpfully" interprets your search to show you things it thinks you want instead of what you asked for.
- kbenson 3y agoThat is the obvious interpretation, which for some reason completely eluded me. My mind somehow went down a rabbit hole of whole google structured markup, but those are Apple UI terms, so I couldn't see how it mattered unless it was in some iOS google search app, and at that point I was already in a thought prison of my own assumed context, even though this is so obvious in retrospect. Thanks!
- CodeCompost 3y agoI've been trying out Kagi since the HN post from just under two weeks ago. Enjoying it so far. The post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37603905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37603905
- figassis 3y agoI've been on DDG for a while now. Do you think Kagi is considerable better? If so, how? Genunely interested as I'm on the fence.
- CodeCompost 3y agoI had been using DDG for a while now and sometimes still fell back on Google for searches. I would say that Kagi so far has been as good as the Google of about 2-3 years ago. The primary reason why I switched over is the argument "nothing is free". I am hoping that paying for a search service means they'll respect my privacy. I'm on a monthly plan so at the first whiff of controversy I'm out. So far so good, but I'm keeping an eye on it.
- figassis 3y ago> as good as the Google of about 2-3 years ago. And that's a good thing? That's 2020 Google, in all it's evil glory. That's just around when I switched to DDG.
- CodeCompost 3y agoOk maybe 10 years ago? When Google was still good. Kagi has a free tier if you want to check it out.
- chankstein38 3y agoI once used Google Lens to try to identify a weird defect to some grass in my yard. Instead, I got a bunch of results trying to sell me grass seed. This article doesn't tell me much I didn't already expect but it's interesting and hopeful to hear this is coming up in court!
- Crash0v3rid3 3y agoThe author is making so many assumptions based on a single quote from a slide. There is zero evidence for what they are accusing Google of doing.
- ranting-moth 3y agoIt feels like Google is just running their brand to the ground trying to maximize the profits.
- daft_pink 3y agoPeople will think I work for the company or am getting a commission or something, but just want to say that Kagi is awesome and a great replacement for google. Also, in Google's defense, Amazon is obviously doing the same thing. Why is it so hard to search for the lowest price item on Amazon. Obviously Amazon doesn't want you to comparison shop and spend more $'s especially on their ads.
- tmaly 3y agoI am wondering if and when this change happened. I seem to recall the search results got progressively worse over the last few years.
- hn72774 3y agoNoticed the same on Amazon. Searched for Honey Oat Crunch. The first result was honey, then nestle crunch bars. The third result was the Whole Foods brand cereal. Had to click on that listing, scroll to the bottom, scroll through 3 carousels of other products to find the Cascadian Farms brand I wanted. Then I tried buying the lower priced Whole Foods brand and it had a limit of 3 and a $9.99 delivery fee which offset any savings. Do I drive there to buy it? Is the price the same in store? At that point, screw it, not going to buy it at all. Too much work just to find what I want. Customer obsession is dead at Amazon.
- figassis 3y agoWe’ve been wondering why query operators no longer work, or why you can’t quote text to require it in results anymore. There have been many explanations. Well, now we know, it would have broken this algorithm, so google dropped it.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago[flagged]
- RamblingCTO 3y agoI really hope that one day we'll get back to a better web. Amazon providing you real options, not extorting you and their sellers. Instagram providing you with content you actually like, not rage and engagement bait. Google showing you interesting and relevant stuff on the web. At this point Idiocracy is not a dystopia anymore I'm afraid. We're pushed to consume bullshit everywhere. Our daily services are dictating our behaviour, instead of enabling us. But I don't know what to do I'm afraid.
- BinaryCoder 3y agoWired retracted their article: "After careful review of the op-ed, "How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet," and relevant material provided to us following its publication, WIRED editorial leadership has determined that the story does not meet our editorial standards. It has been removed."