Google Accused Of Secretly Altering Search Queries To Drive More Ads And Sales
I know many of you have heard this before, but Cory Doctorow's enshittification" concept is such a useful framework to think about things:
first, companies are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
As I've highlighted, much of this is driven by the ridiculous demands of Wall St. and the belief that companies have a fiduciary duty to shareholders to increase profits at the expense of everything else, but that's not just wrong, it's incredibly short-sighted. Because the conclusion to the enshittification concept is that once companies go down the enshittification curve, at some point they die. This is why one of the keys to avoiding enshittification is knowing how and when to tell Wall St. to piss off.
There was a time when it looked like Google understood this lesson. When the company filed to go public, Sergey and Larry started the S1 with a letter in which they basically insisted that they wouldn't go down this path, and would always put users first - and that anyone looking to buy shares in the company needed to understand that. Among many similar statements, the letter said:
As a private company, we have concentrated on the long term, and this has served us well. As a public company, we will do the same. In our opinion, outside pressures too often tempt companies to sacrifice long term opportunities to meet quarterly market expectations. Sometimes this pressure has caused companies to manipulate financial results in order to make their quarter." In Warren Buffett's words, We won't smooth' quarterly or annual results: If earnings figures are lumpy when they reach headquarters, they will be lumpy when they reach you."
If opportunities arise that might cause us to sacrifice short term results but are in the best long term interest of our shareholders, we will take those opportunities. We will have the fortitude to do this. We would request that our shareholders take the long term view.
There was a time when it felt like Google kept that promise, but that time seems long past. As the company grew and grew it's clear that it started to go down the enshittification curve just like everyone else, and started to prioritize Wall St.'s quarterly demands over serving users.
I've noted that I don't think the current Google antitrust case (where the trial is currently ongoing) is all that strong, though I think a more recent case that was filed earlier this year seems much stronger. That stronger case is the one involving how Google's ad team manipulated the ads market in a way that it could extract more value out of it, while attempting to block effective competition.
The ongoing case is more about how Google sought to have its search included as the default on various browsers and phones and such.
However, it looks like some of the ad shenanigans are showing up in this case too. Megan Gray (who worked at the FTC and as General Counsel at DuckDuckGo) has been attending the trial and wrote a piece for Wired about a bit of evidence that flashed on the projector screen, suggesting that Google is secretly altering search queries to drive more ads and commerce. If accurate, this is (1) quintessential late stage enshittification and (2) obnoxiously evil:
This onscreen Google slide had to do with a semantic matching" overhaul to its SERP algorithm. When you enter a query, you might expect a search engine to incorporate synonyms into the algorithm as well as text phrase pairings in natural language processing. But this overhaul went further, actually altering queries to generate more commercial results.
There have long been suspicions that the search giant manipulates ad prices, and now it's clear that Google treats consumers with the same disdain. The 10 blue links," or organic results, which Google has always claimed to be sacrosanct, are just another vector for Google greediness, camouflaged in the company's kindergarten colors.
Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here's how it works. 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 that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren't searching for at all. It's not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don't get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can't escape.
I'm guessing that Google would claim that it's not so much replacing" your search as doing an additional search alongside it that (it will claim) helps provide more relevant answers. But, it sure sounds like the line between more relevant" and better for our short-term revenue" got pretty blurry.
As Gray notes:
It's unclear how often, or for how long, Google has been doing this, but the machination is clever and ambitious. I have spent decades looking for examples of Google putting its enormous thumb on the scale to censor or amplify certain results, and it hadn't even occurred to me that Google just flat out deletes queries and replaces them with ones that monetize better. Most scams follow an elementary bait-and-switch technique, where the scoundrel lures you in with attractive bait and then, at the right time, switches to a different option. But Google innovated" by reversing the scam, first switching your query, then letting you believe you were getting the best search engine results.
It's also how you destroy trust. I'd move to Bing or DuckDuckGo, but considering both still have Techdirt mostly deleted from their index, that won't work. Guess it's finally time to try Kagi (which people keep telling me is great).