Google Search is Not Search Anymore
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer.
Google Search is Garbage Designed to Show Ads Instead of What You Searched For.
Wired published and then immediately retracted an op-ed (Archive Today, Wayback Machine) about how Google quietly manipulated what you searched for by turning it into something designed to bring back a lot of ads instead, using machinery that is invisible to the user.
These “imperceptible” manipulations are actually one reason (alongside manually censoring billions of Web resources so that they can’t show up no matter what you search for, at the behest of the American government and Copyright trolls) why Google Search has descended into “garbage” quality over about the last five years or so.
The article was deleted and replaced with a message saying “it did not meet editorial standards” and was removed, but we can only really guess the real reason why.
Google, with 93% of the search engine market, has the ability to punish Web sites that are pissing it off.
Ending up being ranked lower as a way to harass sites into not saying anything bad about them is one possibility that comes to my mind, although I cannot say that’s what happened. All you have to do to destroy a site financially is cut off its ad impressions, which would be ironic if that is what’s going on, since that’s exactly the sort of thing that leads to an Anti-Trust trial in the first place.
Google is basically running the trial anyway, and this is something that leaked out that was put on a projector for a few seconds and then was whisked away.
Things that make you go “hmm”.
I don’t have a hard time believing that, with how everything in this world is designed to make it, basically illegal to exist anywhere without spending money, and also to subject you to advertising every waking moment, that Google has gotten very good with “shaking the couch cushions”.
They’re very desperate now, with the economy in the US failing and millions of people losing their jobs (Google itself recently fired over 12,000), and with express elevator inflation, and consumers pulling back, ad revenue hasn’t looked this bad since the DotCom Bubble collapse.
So Google is, getting very aggressive lately. Maybe you’ve already seen the manipulations and anti-adblock shit over at YouTube?
I doubt DuckDuckGo (which is a skin for Bing) is even this bad. First of all, Microsoft would have to invest a lot of money into being this rapacious, and they’ve been on a layoffs spree at Bing and Edge anyway, and even if they were, they’re only a few percent. A rounding error.
Google is definitely in more of a position to cause harm. Uniquely positioned to cause harm.
Again, when I saw that Wired retracted this, there was only one real plausible (to me) answer that popped into my head.
In “Being the Ricardos”, a a dramatized documentary of sorts about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Desi argues with the studio about something and has to go to an executive that was higher up. The higher-up sends a letter to the lower official that simply reads, “Don’t fuck with the Cuban!”
And I think that’s what’s going on here.
I think that people are too afraid to make Google angry.
Now, maybe Google tapped someone on the shoulder, and maybe it didn’t have to.
Either way, I think we just witnessed part of the implosion of what remained of journalistic integrity. █