It’s worse than that, in Google’s current antitrust suit, the government showed that Google stopped searching for your exact text…. Instead they replace your text with the most profitable text that’s close to what you’re searching for. So you can’t actually get better results by refining your query anymore.

Meaning that Google is defrauding their users (making it look like they searched for something they didn’t give you the results for) and they defrauded AdWords clients because I paid for an ad when someone searches for X but Google manipulated a search for Y into X so that I’d have to pay more even though the user didn’t actually use my keyword.

Aaaaand we wonder why Google sucks now.

….. always the same reason that a company turns hostile to their clients….. “I’m big enough I don’t care, and I want more money, fuck you”

[–] SheeEttin@lemmy.world 35 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Wired retracted that article because the writer misunderstood the slides.

https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/

[–] ArbiterXero@lemmy.world 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That’s interesting… I’m curious now….

They may have misinterpreted it, but now I wanna know what it REALLY is.

[–] SheeEttin@lemmy.world 23 points 10 months ago (1 children)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37802116

If you search for "kids clothing", when it goes to pull ads to put above the results, it fuzzes the search phrase for synonyms. So for example if TJ Maxx has purchased ads for "kidswear", that's a semantic match, so they'll show the TJ Maxx ads even though it's not one of the exact keywords they picked.

[–] ArbiterXero@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

While I’m not arguing your point, it certainly appears you’re right…..

I just can’t help but feel like the original story (despite the inaccuracy) was on to something.

A few years ago when Google stopped processing quotes in the search properly, their search engine started shitting the bed HARD.

I’ve always felt that since that time they’ve been searching the wrong things. Search has gotten worse. It’s been better for finding items I want to buy, but complete dogshit for everything else. I don’t particularly buy that seo’s got a sudden unexplained boost at that time.

I don’t know, the article (despite the inaccuracies) really felt like it explained everything nicely. So the article might be wrong but…. There’s still something there Google isn’t telling us. I kinda wonder if it’s true despite the lack of evidence.

[–] MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Wait quotes no longer work?

[–] ArbiterXero@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It’s not that they don’t work entirely, they just started “fuzzing “ them like normal search.

They’re no longer a hard explicit.

[–] MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 3 points 10 months ago

Probably explains why sometimes i can't seem to find what i really want

[–] 0xD@infosec.pub -2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Stop the insanity, there is no need to drive into conspiracies.

[–] ArbiterXero@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago

Ehhhh, only a small amount is assumed. The rest is fact. And I’m fairly upfront about it.

[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 24 points 10 months ago

I feel this, especially when I'm looking up technical information. I'll specifically exclude keywords and they show up in the first result.

Half the time I feel the search engine doesn't care what I'm looking for.

[–] Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml 6 points 10 months ago

Same algorithm that sends you right wing bullshit whenever you try to find anything. I sure as fuck don't want to see that but they seem to.