Is Google Right?

[SV Siren]

Google is a monster..and it is not the same monster to everyone. There are some very good points brought up here already, but there are some things that have been missed.

I used to do SEO for my company, and it was a 24/7 kind of job. I would spend an hour or more a day, everyday, researching and on technical SEO forums trying to keep up with Google's algorithm changes. For a while I was getting really good at it. I had our company come up on page one for results under certain search terms, and as a result my sales skyrocketed by 30% or more. Then in one day google did a major re-write of their algorithm and my sales fell to almost previous in the course of three weeks. It took months of research and trial and error to get back to previous sales levels.


The one thing that remains a constant is your search history. Google tracks by IP address, your searches, and browsing history. It uses that history to tailor your individual search results. For better or for worse that is what it is. You can spoof it, by changing IP's, or using someone else's computer, but even using a different computer will drag along that IP's search history into every search result.


All that said, yes it will return popular results but will also include your data when returning those results. Lets face it, for Abramovich, his yacht "A" is photographed and commented about, everywhere it goes. It is most likely the most talked about yacht(however ugly it is) in the world. The more something is put out on the internet, the higher the "weight" of it for search results.


Have you ever noticed that when you visit certain forums, or sites after doing some internet searches, there are suddenly adverts for items that are very similar to what you were looking at? For example on this page there is an advert for Google Chrome at the top under the link bar. I don't have Chrome, and don't want it for a few reasons, but ALL the time I get a pop up asking me to download it for free, and there is the advert lurking anyways.


With all this data and power google has, it can certainly change perception and mold culture. For example, I ran the search for American Inventors, I recognized only two of them in the images bar, and all but 1 were African American, and that was Edison. This is blatant manipulation of the results for one reason or another...make no mistake about it.

[ras1544]

I have noticed a change in Google over the last few years also, simple things are harder for me to locate now while using Google. I'm a little older and not the best on a computer to start with. Is there another search engine that's any better at this time. I've used Yahoo but it seems the same as Google.

[barnakiel]

You can try ecosia. I have google, wiki and ecosia as my default engines.


https://www.ecosia.org/



In recent Firefox, if you type anything in the address bar then a small pop up may appear below where you can pick up the engine of your choice - bing, amazon, ecosia, wiki, etc.


You are right finding some things just got more difficult but I think it may be due to the fact that today there are so many more things on the Internet.


Today I like the way google returns simple semantic searches like 'distance from NY to the Azores' or 'love definition' or BTC price today' and '1897.76 USD into EUR'. These return just what I want, rather than a list of interesting but irrelevant hits.


So I think google is generally on the right course and navigating the way to please as many users as one reasonably can.


Cheers,
b.

[cyan]

In fairness to google, they seem to be an equal-opportunity bad actor- more in love with the mechanisms of power and influence than the actual messaging itself. For example, they have been working on a Chinese search engine that would filter out government-prohibited terms such as "freedom of speech" and it would send the to the government those search results attached to mobile phone numbers.
"Do no evil" as a company motto could be the most ironic in history.