How Google Interferes With Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results (msn.com) 115
Long-time Slashdot reader walterbyrd shared this report on "arguably the most powerful lines of computer code in the global economy," the Google algorithms that handle 3.8 million queries every single minute.
But though Google claims its algorithms are objective and autonomous, the Wall Street Journal reports Google "has increasingly re-engineered and interfered with search results to a far greater degree than the company and its executives have acknowledged": More than 100 interviews and the Journal's own testing of Google's search results reveal:
- Google made algorithmic changes to its search results that favor big businesses over smaller ones, and in at least one case made changes on behalf of a major advertiser, eBay Inc., contrary to its public position that it never takes that type of action. The company also boosts some major websites, such as Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook Inc., according to people familiar with the matter.
- Google engineers regularly make behind-the-scenes adjustments to other information the company is increasingly layering on top of its basic search results. These features include auto-complete suggestions, boxes called "knowledge panels" and "featured snippets," and news results, which aren't subject to the same company policies limiting what engineers can remove or change.
- Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results... Google employees and executives, including co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have disagreed on how much to intervene on search results and to what extent. Employees can push for revisions in specific search results, including on topics such as vaccinations and autism.
- To evaluate its search results, Google employs thousands of low-paid contractors whose purpose the company says is to assess the quality of the algorithms' rankings. Even so, contractors said Google gave feedback to these workers to convey what it considered to be the correct ranking of results, and they revised their assessments accordingly, according to contractors interviewed by the Journal. The contractors' collective evaluations are then used to adjust algorithms.
The Journal's findings undercut one of Google's core defenses against global regulators worried about how it wields its immense power -- that the company doesn't exert editorial control over what it shows users.
But though Google claims its algorithms are objective and autonomous, the Wall Street Journal reports Google "has increasingly re-engineered and interfered with search results to a far greater degree than the company and its executives have acknowledged": More than 100 interviews and the Journal's own testing of Google's search results reveal:
- Google made algorithmic changes to its search results that favor big businesses over smaller ones, and in at least one case made changes on behalf of a major advertiser, eBay Inc., contrary to its public position that it never takes that type of action. The company also boosts some major websites, such as Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook Inc., according to people familiar with the matter.
- Google engineers regularly make behind-the-scenes adjustments to other information the company is increasingly layering on top of its basic search results. These features include auto-complete suggestions, boxes called "knowledge panels" and "featured snippets," and news results, which aren't subject to the same company policies limiting what engineers can remove or change.
- Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results... Google employees and executives, including co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have disagreed on how much to intervene on search results and to what extent. Employees can push for revisions in specific search results, including on topics such as vaccinations and autism.
- To evaluate its search results, Google employs thousands of low-paid contractors whose purpose the company says is to assess the quality of the algorithms' rankings. Even so, contractors said Google gave feedback to these workers to convey what it considered to be the correct ranking of results, and they revised their assessments accordingly, according to contractors interviewed by the Journal. The contractors' collective evaluations are then used to adjust algorithms.
The Journal's findings undercut one of Google's core defenses against global regulators worried about how it wields its immense power -- that the company doesn't exert editorial control over what it shows users.
Interfered? (Score:5, Informative)
Strange choice of word. Is it interference or is it the usual on-going improvement in the endless war against SEO?
Google has always been "interfering" with it's search results. That's why it's good. I'm old enough to remember when search engines gave you a keyword match dump and you had to carefully craft your query to filter out the irrelevant stuff and the spam by hand. Google's ability to do that for you is why it quickly became number 1.
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Also, in addition, and on top of that: Google adds arbitrary political bias to your results, at the whim of their engineers. They also add brand-preference bias, though that's either less common, or less interesting to report on, hard to say. But the engineers have tools to shape result to their biases, and they do use them.
Also, in addition, and on top of that: Google gives you personalized results similar to what you've clicked before, which sounds good on the face of it, but has the disastrous side eff
Re:Interfered? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a lot of people mistake anti-SEO for political bias. For example one popular technique is to fine a particular phrase that isn't very popular and popularize it for political purposes. Then when someone searches for that phrase they heard used in a soundbite or on Facebook all they get are sites with one political bias, the one that popularized it.
Then Google notices it's just a synonym for some more common way of phrasing the issue and the advantage disappears, and people claim Google is politically biased and trying to help the other side.
DuckDuckGo uses Google for search results anyway so any actual political bias will be evident there too. As for bubbles, you should block cookies and site data for all sites to avoid that. Everyone should use a whitelist these days.
Re:Interfered? (Score:5, Informative)
DuckDuckGo uses Google for search results anyway
DDG doesn't use Google. [duckduckgo.com] You should remember that from the last time you claimed they did and were proven wrong. They use Bing, Yahoo, and their own search backend.
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That's only their "instant answers" feature. If you check an old version of that page it used to mention that the used search engines including Google for general results, but they removed that bit for some reason and now won't say where the data comes from.
The old page said they used Bing and Yahoo (!) as well
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They say exactly where the data is coming from, it's right there on the page. Read more slowly.
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Pretty aggravating, since that's the only page which seems to list sources for anything.
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Google definitely biases results based on their politics. It's brutally obvious for anyone who isn't marching in lockstep with the liberal/leftist agenda.
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They are liberal AND leftist? At the same time?
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They are liberal AND leftist? At the same time?
They're one in the same, have been a good 20 years at this point, progressive also falls into the same banner. Even though all three are regressive. Even in your own country there is no difference between leftist and liberal.
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There is a link on the page to their "over 400 sources", and some of them are Google.
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That's not really proving your point.
Re:Interfered? (Score:4, Informative)
They are liberal AND leftist? At the same time?
Only in America.
In Europe, a "liberal" is a free-market libertarian.
In Australia, a "liberal" is a conservative.
When writing in an international forum (such as Slashdot) it is best to avoid the term. Use something less ambiguous such as "progressive".
If you want to be pedantic, there is a difference between American liberalism and progressivism. Liberals focus more on fixing society through redistribution, while progressives focus more on regulation. But they overlap enough and both terms are mostly used to describe the same agendas.
Re:Interfered? (Score:4, Interesting)
In America, they aren't liberal either - the term means "in favor of liberty", and the left wing parties haven't been that in a century or more. They just use the term because it still tricks some people. Your attempt to explain what "American liberalism" is an excellent example of how people fall for it.
Nah, the American left-wing is almost entirely Progressive - a party dedicated to using the power of government to "improve" people and society. It was built around social justice and environmentalism, two of its founder's favorite things. It was never, in any way, about small government or liberty.
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As a British person "liberal" has two meanings.
First the common meaning of being permissive and accepting. The right wing media tends to use it as an insult but the left wing media uses it as a complement.
Second the political meaning which is associated with the Liberal Democrats, a centre slightly-right party.
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In germany the liberal party had basically two main interests: no regulation, or less or low regulation in the business world. Low taxes, let the market decide, and not to many rules/regulations/laws that take working hours from "working" into administering. ..
But also they where a spear head for civil liberties. With the same arguments they claimed a business does not need that regulation they argued the police does not need that law to spy on citizens.
They realized to late that germany wanted to be green
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The British Liberal Democrats are similar. Liberal on social issues but fiscally somewhat conservative.
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Every faction claims they are in favor of liberty. They just all define it differently.
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When we boil down a complex world to craft a narrative, the narrative that emerges is one possible narrative out of an exponential space. The more targeted the narrative that emerges, the stronger the author's selection-filter olfactory fingerprint—this partitioned into two dominant receptor trees: vibrant clue smell, and pungent hone smell (compact 10,000 RPM liquid-cooled bench grinders from Acme Amadrone are the latest rage).
Predictive statistical models are almost always bidirectional. If you can
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If this is what is "troll" on slashdot now, perhaps it;s time to be done with slashdot. Well, CmdrTaco's slashdot died long ago. This is just the rotting corpse.
Simple Test (Score:4, Interesting)
In Google, search, "police exonerated by body cam" or something similar.
The entire first page is filled with examples of the Police beating and shooting people, most in questionable circumstances.
Then do it in Duck Duck Go.
You will at least get a mix of stories describing how allegations against the police were refuted by body cam video.
Pretty cut and dried example
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I tried your exact phrase in both Google and DDG.
Google: The first two links were articles about exoneration of police. Additional links were a mix.
DDG: The first seven links were articles about exoneration of police. Additional links were a mix.
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I did the same and noticed something about the DDG results. They are the same story multiple times. So all Google is doing is giving you a wider selection of different stories, rather than the same story (e.g. the "body slam" one) more than once.
So again, it's not political interference, it's just trying to give you better search results by not repeating the same thing over and over again when a single link to a good quality source is enough.
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Strange choice of word. Is it interference or is it the usual on-going improvement in the endless war against SEO?
No, it's direct interference at least on what the WSJ is reporting. Considering that this isn't the first claim, but rather a series of claims including from current and former over the last several years, it's more likely worse then what we know. The removal by google to honor boolean searches is why duckduckgo has been surging the last few years too. It's not exactly hard, and it's something that nearly everyone at least here in North America learns to do when they learn the Dewey decimal system.
Re:Interfered? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I can't keyword search on google even when I want to nowadays. I'll put things in quotes and google still constantly replaces entire words with other words its algorithm decided I "meant".
Re:Interfered? (Score:4, Interesting)
They should use what they have now for the 'ok, google' users and put the usable search back for the rest of us. I think the problem might be they are trying to use the same algorithms for both use cases. 'power users' still exist google.
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This. There is still a site "Advanced Search" (https://www.google.com/advanced_search [google.com]), but it does happily ignore part of the search criteria.
Downhill indeed. I could even understand if they wanted to display a "newbie friendly" default site, but killing the functionality for advanced users? It cannot be so hard to go over the first round of results and apply the stricter filters from the advanced search to that. If that search result comes up empty, so be it.
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+ doesn't work well any more, but - still works fine. Quotes are mixed.
degraded (Score:2)
Very annoying,
I also miss being able to fish multiple cache copies where manipulation of a presentation or conversation's history has occurred.
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Well https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duck... [duckduckgo.com]. Changed over and only rarely looked back just to compare and duckduckgo is better, in fact want to search YouTube, you are better of using duckduckgo https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duck... [duckduckgo.com] because YouTube search is a broken as. You can type in exact title and corporate propaganda sites still top the search and fill most spots and sometimes with not even one word from the search in the title.
The only thing I use Google search is for Google Maps and street view because I ca
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I'm not sure. Does Google search include text that isn't visible on the page? I know I get a lot of results that don't include all the terms I'm asking for, but I've never been certain they weren't invisibly present. (I didn't search through the "raw html" image of the page.)
So that *could* be the explanation. That's they're ignoring what I'm asking for for reasons of their own is another possibility.
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Actually that's one of the things that Google down-ranks sites for. They use bots pretending to be the Chrome browser, presumably from unusual IP addresses not normally associated with their crawler. If the content doesn't match the site gets down-ranked for SEO shenanigans.
Re: Interfered? (Score:1, Insightful)
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You mean Brietbart. It's down ranked because it's disreputable, same as the left leaning bullshit factories.
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You mean Brietbart. It's down ranked because it's disreputable, same as the left leaning bullshit factories.
No, what they said is what they mean. Sites like media matters, think progress(before they died), dailykos, show up in the feed. All three of those are worse then Breitbart. Trying to claim that they downrank because it's disreputable is just bullshit, especially when think progress manufactured news, and media matters has been caught repeatedly lying. Going by your reasoning CNN should have been removed years ago.
Re: Interfered? (Score:1, Insightful)
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Daily Kos, Bipartisan Report, Palmer Report. Oh and Patribiotics.
Re: Interfered? (Score:4, Insightful)
Your talking out of your ass. Breitbart has been consistently accurate in their news reporting. You made the claim, give some hard examples and show us fake news that they have supplied. Just because you disagree with their outlook doesn't make is disreputable.
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Breitbart has been consistently accurate in their news reporting.
lolololol [politifact.com] and also hahahahaha [wikipedia.org]. The fact that they occasionally report some news correctly doesn't change the fact that they have deliberately published falsehoods on multiple occasions. Breitbart is actual fake news.
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Responding with a pair of biased sources proves nothing. You actually tried to cite politifact and wikipedia with regards to politics and thought this would be credible?
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I never imagined that it would change your tiny little mind about anything, since you think Breitbart is a reputable source, and you're allergic to citations.
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If you want to play that game then we can never know if Brietbart is full of shit or not because every source either of us cite can be dismissed as biased.
I'm happy to let readers look at drinkypoo's sources and make up their own minds.
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Piffle. You made the claim, back it up. No need to rely on third party sites at all. Take what's on their site today. Find some fake news. Go on, it shouldn't take you long at all if what you said was true. They have dozens of stories which will give you a wide range of material to work. Surely you can find one fake news story.
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Well their main headline is currently "Exclusive: White House Riding High After Shampeachment Week 1" so not a good start for neutral, factual reporting.
While most of the stuff does have a grain of truth to it the presentation is often very misleading. For example they have an article about "climategate", some decade old bullshit that feeds in to their climate change denial and which was basically nothing. It's kind of true to say that the "mainstream media" is ignoring it, but that's making the reader thin
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They don't claim to be neutral. They own their bias. They are honest about their bias whereas sites like NY Times or Wash Post pretend to be neutral. They also stick to the facts and have a far better track record than NY Times or Wash Post.
They also have what is probably the most diverse newsroom in the business. I can't recall any story of theirs having to be retracted. I certainly don't recall there ever being successfully sued for getting a news story wrong. Don't presume they are fake news just because
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It's hardcore politicized interference. On any politically contentious subject bing is far better. They're also blatantly prejudiced with chrome's new tab suggestions. I have a chromium based third party focused browser and chrome itself on my phone. The third party browser gives me suggestions like you'd expect, topical items that are particularly relevant to current news based on what I search and where I am. Local news in particular gets featured often. Chrome on the other hand overwhelmingly shows me th
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Can you give us an example of a political search that works better on Bing?
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Bill Gates for President!
Mellisa gates for President!
Bill Gates for President?
Re: Interfered? (Score:2)
"That's why it's good."
Big Brother Google hasn't been _good_ at searching the internet for several years now. A Google search used to return the consensus of the internet. Nowadays a Google search returns 100% corporate trash. Whether that's the Corporate Progressive Nazi Narrative for anything remotely sociopolitical; Corporate Anticulture for anything related to art, entertainment, & culture; or straight up corporate shilling for anything commercial. NO ONE trusts Google anymore.
Altavista rejiggered... (Score:2)
Broken beyond repair (Score:5, Interesting)
Google is damn near worthless now. I searched for *linux step file viewer* and the first result is a page with windows only software. Not a single mention of Linux. It ignored the word Linux in my search. Fuck them. Going to try Bing next time.
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That's odd, I typed in the same thing and got quite a few Linux-related results on the front page. You must do a lot of searching for Windows-based software if it's pointing you towards Windows with those search words. Either that or you're exaggerating about the low quality of your results.
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Just tried it and this is the first link https://3d-viewers.com/step-vi... [3d-viewers.com] Not linux related. The second link however is https://www.freecadweb.org/ [freecadweb.org] which does have a Linux version. Google gives you what is popular, not what is accurate.
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You must do a lot of searching for Windows-based software if it's pointing you towards Windows with those search words
That would be a reason by itself not to rely on Google. Perhaps GP did a lot of searching for Windows software before, but is now planning a Linux migration? Google personalizing search records based on searches in GP's past would be counterproductive then
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Just give me unbiased results. DON'T bother trying to read my mind.
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Yeah, this.
ArchieBunker's claim says more about what he is normally using Google to search for (Windows software) than how Google works. He is just another fake "Linux user".
Favorite anecdotes (Score:3)
Google is near worthless now. I searched for *linux step file viewer* and the first result is a page with windows only software. Not a single mention of Linux. It ignored the word Linux in my search. Fuck them. Going to try Bing next time.
My first hint was when searching for "xxx yyy zzz" (without the quotes), *all* results (!) have "missing zzz" followed by "must include zzz" link. This was not typo'ed words, those are handled (in most cases correctly) another way.
My second hint was searching for a word definition "define: zzz" (without quotes), the *first* page (!) of results did not have a link to the definition.
Anyone else have favorite Google anecdotes to share?
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Even when I do put quotes around words they routinely get ignored. Google would rather throw random shit at me than just say no results.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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I don't know if Bing is actually better or not, but at least Bing pays me to trawl through their ad-ridden results to find what I was looking for.
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Bing is more explicit in it's search results. That really means you need to be more concise on exactly what you're looking for, and for most people on /. this isn't a problem. But we've got an entire generation of kids who grew up on google curated and tailored results right to your page who easily get lost in it. The only way to fix it is to make sure that they know *how* to search properly.
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I use Google to find something for sale. I use DDG for meaningful search results. Google is just an ad farm.
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Google is damn near worthless now. I searched for *linux step file viewer* and the first result is a page with windows only software. Not a single mention of Linux. It ignored the word Linux in my search. Fuck them. Going to try Bing next time.
I like searching for solutions to my problems with Google. It lets me know that I'm the only one on the planet that has ever had the problem I'm having. Plus I love the fact that every other search engine copies the nonsense that Google shits out. I LOVE IT
Re:Broken beyond repair (Score:5, Informative)
That's funny, when I search for a problem I'm having with google products google usually gives me dozens of pages of people having exactly the same problem for the past 5 or 6 years, and not a single person who has found a solution, or anyone at google who is willing to even acknowledge the issue.
Re: Broken beyond repair (Score:2)
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Throwing stones (Score:1)
I want relevant results (Score:5, Insightful)
If google does mess with their algorthms so much so that they aren't giving the most relevant results there is always duckduckgo.com or bing or anyone else who wants to create a search engine.
One last thing, the page ranking algorithm must be secret. It is how they are evaluation web pages. All evaluations should be secret otherwise people will game them. The snowflakes who claim it isn't fair can go cry somewhere else or make their own search engine.
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Deceptive information can be countered by better information. Denying people information offers no such remedy.
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That doesn't seem to be an anti-vaxx site. The GP is talking about things like searching for "are vaccines safe" and getting a load of anti-vaxx bullshit that puts children in real, actual danger.
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Re: I want relevant results (Score:1)
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The problem is that if you give em this kind of secrecy, you can't check what they're actually doing and hold em responsible for it.
It's the ol and good "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely".
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It's a moot argument as people will game the results no matter what they are. What your arguing is the functional equivalent of security through obscurity. It's obscures the built in favoritism that has taken over Google the last several years. The idea that you could simply build your own search engine and compete with Google is beyond absurd. In the real world multibillion dollar corporations have spent billions of dollars and only gained 1 or 2% market share.
It's easy enough to say that you don't mind ho
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I'm also fine with the algorithm being tweaked against anti vaxxers and other science deniers. There is so much nonsense science on the internet that I'm sure a simple AI would be confused. So for things that are scientifically true or false then tweaking the weights of pages is fine. I'm also fine with burying content like child porn.
Science deniers is a very loaded phrase. I'd lump those who put transgender men in womens sports as science deniers, as well as lacking in simply common sense, yet I suspect Google will give them a pass as part of their left biases. You're remarkably fine with not knowing what they point you towards and what they hide from you. Do you like not knowing how much you are shown is propaganda? You're far more trusting than I am I suppose. I wouldn't trust Google to show me any facts that might go against le
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I'm also fine with the algorithm being tweaked against anti vaxxers and other science deniers. There is so much nonsense science on the internet that I'm sure a simple AI would be confused. So for things that are scientifically true or false then tweaking the weights of pages is fine.
Oh, good, so Google tweaks against pages that push the idea that you can change your gender by wishing it? Oh ... so not those "science deniers"?
The snowflakes who claim it isn't fair can go cry somewhere else or make their own search engine.
I know the snowflake thing stings, but really, you guys are the ones with the coloring books and "safe spaces", so trying to turn it around doesn't work.
Ugh, this is so dumb (Score:3)
Google is problematic because they're building panopticons for both commercial and government use, not because of the quality of their search results.
" Google made algorithmic changes to its search results that favor big businesses over smaller ones, and in at least one case made changes on behalf of a major advertiser, eBay Inc."
You mean they're returning results that most people actually want?
"Google engineers regularly make behind-the-scenes adjustments to other information the company is increasingly layering on top of its basic search results."
Yeah, so what? The problem is that they're piling on crap I don't want, not that they're constantly twiddling it. And I can just ignore it. It's like magic!
"Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results."
This is conceivably worrying, but is there any evidence they're doing it for any reason other than improving results?
"To evaluate its search results, Google employs thousands of low-paid contractors whose purpose the company says is to assess the quality of the algorithms' rankings. Even so, contractors said Google gave feedback to these workers to convey what it considered to be the correct ranking of results"
Yeah, no kidding? They gave them instructions? Oh noes!
"The Journal's findings undercut one of Google's core defenses against global regulators worried about how it wields its immense power -- that the company doesn't exert editorial control over what it shows users."
Let's see some evidence that they're doing any of this stuff for any reason other than producing results people will click on before we get all worried about it. The big concern with Google is who and what they're tracking, and who is viewing that data, not their search results — which are consistently high-quality, unlike any other search engine. When I go looking for things on Google, I can usually find them. When I go looking for them on other search engines, I usually can't. From where I'm sitting, it looks like what they're doing is working.
Google has both a China and US blacklist (Score:4, Interesting)
"In November 2018 The Guardian reported on group of Google employees who published an open letter calling on their employer to cancel its plans to build a censored search engine for China. Google employees were very upset that Google’s Project Dragonfly would allow the Chinese government to blacklist certain search terms."
"In April Project Veritas released leaked documents from a Google insider that shows The Gateway Pundit, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Newsbusters, American Thinker, MRCTV, American Lookout, Twitchy, Daily Caller, Natural News, The Rebel Media, LifeNews, BizPac Review, YoungCons and many others are being targeted, censored, blacklisted and silenced by Google."
"It doesn’t matter if you are pro-Tump or a Never Trumper– as long as you are conservative you made the Google list!"
Here's [projectveritas.com] the complete list!
Here's [wsj.com] the original "Wall Street Journal" article.
If you find that article paywalled, here's [dailymail.co.uk] a "Daily Mail" article on the WSJ article with most of the particulars.
(The quotes up top are from a recent TGP post [thegatewaypundit.com].)
Re:Google has both a China and US blacklist (Score:5, Insightful)
Has the Veritas-reported leak been independently verified? Project Veritas are not exactly a reliable source. Even if it is true, I also see freethoughtblogs.com, modernliberals.com, forwardprogressives.com (now defunct), liberalamerica.org... it's not a list of conservative sites: It's a list of sites with a 'high user block rate,' which includes a lot of sites with a strong political bias, be that to the left or to the right.
I notice there's also an separate list that excludes a lot of torrent sites, and one down the bottom that excludes some known fake-news sites that imitate more respectable organisations through blatant trademark infringement.
Here's a distressing thought for you: What if Google were trying to compile a list of unreliable sources and rambling conspiracy-theory peddlers and, for some reason I just cannot imagine, it turns out that right-leaning sites happen to meet that description more often than left-leaning sites?
All computer programs are objective and autonomous (Score:2)
By definition, 100% of all computer programs are objective and autonomous. Of course, all computer programs are written by humans who are neither objective nor autonomous. There are humans who claim objectivity, but as I learned on the first day of my high school history class, true objectivity is impossible. The only humans who claim objectivity are either liars or fools.
More importantly, the people who claim objectivity are trying to hide something. They really want to claim something else that is mor
Re: All computer programs are objective and autono (Score:2)
Low paid? (Score:2)
"- To evaluate its search results, Google employs thousands of low-paid contractors whose purpose the company says is to assess the quality of the algorithms' rankings."
I can do it for free.
Give me what I fucking asked for instead of what you _think_ I wanted!
Personal impression: quality is no longer better (Score:1)
...than others. Recently I have tried DuckDuckGo again, and while its search results was quite weak a few years ago, it handles 95% of my searches just fine. Google is still better for very specialized stuff, where DuckDuckGo comes up empty.
Because user's needs change (Score:3)
The needs of users change over time, hence the search engines do change to reflect these.
For example, take a simple query like "Walmart". Previously if you just returned "walmart.com" as the first result, everything was fine. Now, not so much.
Maybe you are looking for the local store. Then a maps result should be in the second place. If this is a mobile device, maybe it should even be first.
Maybe you are looking for Walmart stock information. Was it up, or down today? How many point? Why?
Maybe you are looking for a company profile. There comes the little info box on the right. All things, like CEO, incomes, number of stores could be listed.
Maybe you are looking for pharmacy hours.
Maybe there was a recent event in a store. Unfortunate that it is, there was a recent shooting. Even if the article might not have as many clicks as the other results, int that particular day it might be important.
And once you start bringing more relevant results to the first page, naturally some other older results are pushed down.
What matters first is satisfying the user's needs. They are the ones searching for the information.
[ disclaimer: I work at Google, but not at core search. This is my external observation as a user, and I see similar things at Bing, which I also use ].
What really pisses me off (Score:2)
Still like Google... (Score:2)
... DuckDuckGo still sucks in showing me better search results even though it has better privacy.
Re: (Score:2)
I generally use DDG, but when it fails I try Google which often does better.
But of course, I do not do it the other way around. So it may be that they are just different.
"Google claims its algorithms are objective and a" (Score:2)
They aren't.
You get at least three different or 4 different results when:
a) being logged in
b) not being logged in (into google)
c) browsing anonaymously
d) using a different browser.
e) use a different OS / or a random computer you never used
When I enter "dart language GUI framework" I expect the exact same hits regardless of a) - d) above, but I get different.
Even worth is: they list some random stuff on top of the list, which is missing one of the search terms, and instead show a link like "must include 'GUI
You Mean (Score:2)
Google employees quality testors to rate the product and, like any good software company, frequently make changes to their product to make it better. Unsurprisingly, most of those result in small modifications of their results, i.e. fine-tuning.
And sometimes the changes will favor big businesses over small ones. Heck it might even be trained to do that on purpose but that's not sinister. It reflects the plausible judgement (google would verify via an experiment) that when people google a store they usual
Re: Break Up Google (Score:1)
stop Google now (Score:2)
Stop Google now, before it's too late.