A Note From WIRED Leadership
www.wired.com

It looks like the ex-DDG employee got the details wrong, and read the slides backwards.

  • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
    928·
    1 year ago

    Nah, they’re definitely doing this. I searched for my itch fame page on Google with my username, and it didn’t come up in the search. But sure enough things I could buy came up in the search.

    Then I went to duckduckgo and searched the exact same thing and my page was first I. The results, it even had all of my games as search result hits as well.

    Google is most definitely showing you search results other than what you searched for.

    • SpaghettiYeti@lemmy.world
      5·
      1 year ago

      Yes, speaking from experience building ads on Google.

      You’re tracked with an anonymized id. If they’re able to remotely tell any of your past activity or similar searches by others searching for the same term, then they will alter results.

      This is especially true for any paid ads that appear since companies can bid to appear higher on competitor terms or names.

      I can even say “if someone downloaded x-z specific apps on their phones, then consider them interested in my ad”.

    • Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.de
      51·
      1 year ago

      Or, another explanation is that more people are interested in things they can buy than in you (and I understand how hard it might be to believe in that), and Google algorithms “know” that

        • Jako301@feddit.de
          33·
          1 year ago

          Tbh it sounds like you didn’t search for the website, but just put the term itch.io into the search box. Special characters like a dot get completely ignored in the search, so you searched for “itch io username” which will give massively different results depending on the username.

          If you search for the site properly by using site:itch.io then Google will only show you results from that site and nothing else.

          Lots of complaints about the Google results often come down to user errors.

          • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
            3·
            1 year ago

            K, then why did a different search engine give me correct results while Google gave me advertisements? Nevermind that a different person in this thread is telling you they uses to work advertising for Google, and they so infact change the search results.

  • Holyginz@lemmy.world
    875·
    1 year ago

    See the cynic in me is wondering whether it was actually a mistake like they said, or if it’s a cover up.

    • plistig@feddit.de
      824·
      1 year ago

      “Hey, Wired, weird thing with our search algorithm. It seems to always put you on page 2 since your article dropped. I wonder why that is?” – Larry Page, probably.

      • xionzui@sh.itjust.works
        11·
        1 year ago

        The slide shows neither. It shows that they use synonyms to get more results. They take a search for “kids clothing” and add results for “children’s clothing” and “kidswear”

      • stifle867@programming.dev
        5·
        1 year ago

        My interpretation was this + in terms of the actual “sponsored” results work by matching “kids clothing” with advertisers who match for that term, and Google “changing” it into “$brand_name kids clothing” which seems entirely obvious when spelling it out.

        I haven’t used Google as my primary search engine for many years but occasionally I do run a search on it. While the quality of results is extremely low, I never noticed anything obvious like a generic search term only returning results for a specific brand + that search term like the original article implied.

        It seemed like a giant misunderstanding of how it all works from the start but made for a great headline.

  • JokeDeity@lemm.ee
    613·
    1 year ago

    Google has been giving me far far shittier results over the last 5-10 years. It’s crazy to think, but in my opinion it was WAY more accurate years ago than it is today at giving me what I blatantly searched for.

    • space@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      17·
      1 year ago

      It’s not just Google. The Internet has been getting worse over the last years. People don’t make sites any more. Blogs have moved to closed and centralized social media platforms. Forums are rarely used, most communities moved to platforms like reddit and Discord.

      Most of these platforms make finding content very difficult. You won’t find articles posted on Facebook, Twitter threads and Discord discussions in search engines. You have to create an account on their platform, then use their shitty search (or be subscribed to the right people) to see it.

    • fubo@lemmy.world
      14·
      1 year ago

      Put another way, spam sites have become more effective at defeating anti-webspam measures.

    • realitista@lemm.eeEnglish
      151·
      1 year ago

      At the very least, it’s no better than the alternatives any more. Whenever I put Duck Duck Go up against Google, I get very similar results, other than all the extra ads on Google.

      • caseyweederman@lemmy.ca
        7·
        1 year ago

        Same experience.
        I’ll click on a page, scroll for a bit, get frustrated, Ctrl-F for the active part of my search string, and not find it.
        I left Google because of that but it followed me to Duck Duck Go.

      • space@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        2·
        1 year ago

        DDG is just a front-end for Bing. There are very few search engines that actually do their own indexing.

        • realitista@lemm.ee
          2·
          1 year ago

          Interesting. I looked it up and found this, so it looks like it’s some hybrid of many sources:

          Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience.
        • Tibert@jlai.lu
          02·
          1 year ago

          Well I noticed a difference between duckduckgo and Ecosia, both taking results from Bing. Not sure if it’s the language setting, or something else.

  • CaptObvious@literature.cafe
    572·
    1 year ago

    While there’s no doubt that something is going on to make Google searches garbage, news outlets don’t publish retractions lightly. I’m inclined to believe that they are convinced that the story was substantially inaccurate.

    • MelodiousFunk@kbin.social
      601·
      1 year ago

      Thank you, CaptObvious.

      …you know, your username makes it difficult to sound sincere when addressing you.

    • StraightArrow@feddit.de
      21·
      1 year ago

      Why do you think so?

      They could have been threatened by Google or Google might have shown them the correct documents, but how would we be able to tell?

      • CaptObvious@literature.cafe
        2·
        1 year ago

        Short of visiting their newsroom and asking to see the documents in question, which no self-respecting journalist would share, we’ll have to trust them.

        However, having directed a newsroom in a previous life, I can tell you that a retraction is the last thing any editor wants to do. A minor error would be chalked up to working under a deadline and corrected in the next follow-up. A major error would get a stand-alone correction. The error has to be egregious to get a retraction.

        Libel might be a threat, but it’s devilishly difficult to prove that a news outlet has libeled a corporation. So long as the story were factually accurate, there’s nothing Google could plausibly threaten that would prompt a retraction.

  • SokathHisEyesOpen@lemmy.mlEnglish
    454·
    1 year ago

    I guess Google threatened to sue Wired? It’s pretty obvious that Google is showing profitable products and click farms instead of relevant information you’re actually looking for.

    • AItoothbrush@lemmy.zipEnglish
      112·
      1 year ago

      My mom almost got scammed while buying tickets online because google placed an ad site before the real site in search results. Thankfully she always asks me or my sister before buying stuff online.

      • cosmic_slate@dmv.socialEnglish
        131·
        1 year ago

        I understand that you may have qualms with Google but this is a very strange take. Google is the default search engine for a number of browsers and is a very, very common household name.

        • TowardsTheFuture@lemmy.zipEnglish
          84·
          1 year ago

          I mean, edge is the default browser and it’s not like you’d be crazy to say “l’m surprised people use edge as their internet browser”

          But yeah, it’s not surprising people use Google, it is surprising people don’t know alternatives are not horrible anymore and Google generally is.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
            3·
            1 year ago

            IDK, I do think it’s crazy to say you’re surprised people use Edge. As you said, it’s the default on Windows, so a very large number of Windows users will be using it because they haven’t bothered to change the default.

            I guess I could see it as hyperbole, but not as an actual, serious belief.

        • lilcs420@lemm.ee
          22·
          1 year ago

          I know, but I use vpn when searching and puzzles every search made me leave years ago. Im aware most use google.

      • ThatHermanoGuy@midwest.social
        6·
        1 year ago

        As opposed to what? I’ve tried to switch to DDG so many times, but its lack of explicit phrase searching makes it practically useless. I just end up using g! all the time until I finally just give up and switch back.

        • The Doctor@beehaw.orgEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Yeah… if I search for Terraform stuff on the Big G, I get shit-tons of LLM-generated crapsites. If I search for the TF stuff I’m working on at DDG, I don’t get anything.

      • stifle867@programming.dev
        35·
        1 year ago

        Most people don’t understand how bad Google has become. It’s like not noticing how tall you’ve grown until your grandmother points it out.

        • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
          14·
          1 year ago

          I mean, it doesn’t really matter how correct the general sentiment is if the article still gets a key detail or two wrong. The incorrect details still need a retraction, and if they’re the main reasoning for the general conclusion… well, it’s much more attractive to have an article with actual reasons than, “it feels like Google search sucks.”.

          • stifle867@programming.dev
            1·
            1 year ago

            I’m not sure what your comment has to do with mine because I wasn’t discussing anything in the article, simply replying to someone else’s comment.

            To be clear I understand that the article was incorrect, and I had my suspicions when I first saw it too (which I posted in another comment).

            My comment is in reference to Google Search’s general degradation of user experience and quality of search results over the many years. Sponsored results that are hard for the average people to notice are sponsored, and they take up half the screen. SEO spam, quora spam, specific searches returning general results, etc. There is still a wealth of organic and original content out there. I just never find it through search.

  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
    202·
    1 year ago

    They still fuck up “Did you mean…?” to ignore whatever you wrote. Somewhere in the last decade that went from “haha whoops you’re right” to “stop talking over me, robot.”

  • Gabu@lemmy.world
    228·
    1 year ago

    “Yeah, the fact our search engine has sucked for a decade has nothing to do with us changing your search. Trust me, bro” - Google’s CEO.

    • Deebster@lemmy.ml
      4·
      1 year ago

      Apart from that archive.today seemed down yesterday - I was worried they weren’t coming back!

    • hackris@lemmy.ml
      4·
      1 year ago

      Do people deliberately not use archive.org? That’s the one I always use but with everyone using these alternatives, I wonder if I should use them too.

      • The Doctor@beehaw.orgEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        Since the lawsuits started? It would seem so. Lots of folks are worried about getting caught up in them, I guess. Enough so that ICanHazPDF is becoming a thing again.

      • willybe@lemmy.ca
        1·
        1 year ago

        Also, I’m not sure if IA’s purpose is to get a around a pay wall. That might be considered violating copywrite.

  • Etterra@lemmy.world
    2111·
    1 year ago

    I think what’s more likely is that Google threatened the hell out of the employee.

  • Chunk@lemmy.world
    147·
    1 year ago

    “oopsie I accidentally wrote the hit piece of the year about my competitor and it turned out to be a lie! Tee hee silly me what even is journalistic integrity?”

    This article was a smoking gun. Google is scummy but this was shocking. And it was a fucking lie? I actually hope Google goes after wired. That’s not justice against Google that’s malpractice.

    • gr522x@lemmy.ml
      104·
      1 year ago

      I’ll never understand corporate apologists that live to defend the billion dollar companies ruining the Internet. Google is an ad company, but you can’t believe they’d alter search queries to sell ads? How could you possibly trust Google after they’ve been caught illegally sniffing people’s Wi-Fi with their Google Maps vehicles, spying on kids in school with Chromebooks and destroying incriminating documents in a federal court case to hide their actions?

      • boff@lemmy.one
        10·
        1 year ago

        Just because they’ve done some things wrong doesn’t mean they have done everything that’s wrong. I would rather base my criticism on companies (or people or ideas) on true facts.

        That means sometimes there’s an uncomfortable situation where an otherwise evil organization isn’t always evil in every situation, and that is ok.

        • gr522x@lemmy.ml
          0·
          1 year ago

          Isn’t greed inherently evil? Google takes it to a new level as they aren’t only a greedy corporation, but a military contractor embedded into the military industrial complex. So, when the US gets involved in a conflict Google profits and they control the flow of information through their search and video platform monopolies. They remove content critical of US military intervention, not to protect national security, but their profits from the defense sector.

          • boff@lemmy.one
            0·
            1 year ago

            In order to make a claim like that you need two different evidences: one showing that they did remove content critical of the US and one showing that they removed it because they intended to use the removal to make more money

            • gr522x@lemmy.ml
              1·
              1 year ago

              This is the first you’ve heard about Google/Youtube censoring people or altering search queries? It must have been a decade ago when they removed Kodi from autocomplete because “it was used by pirates.” Even when I disagree with the people they remove, which is most of the time, I am still uncomfortable with a for profit corporation like Alphabet Inc having that much power to decide what people can and cannot see in addition to manipulating search results.

              Nearly every content creator I follow talks about not being about to talk about certain issues for fear of being canceled. That’s censorship, maybe not Chinese style putting you in jail, but it’s still corporate censorship. Google has plenty of defense contracts, as well as contracts with other government agencies. Their previous CEO now leads the Defense Advanced Research Agency (DARPA) and they work with the defense department on AI and robotics.

              A company as untrustworthy and clandestine as Google will make it difficult to connect some dots, but corporation are legally structured to always act in accordance with shareholder interest and Google legally has the right to remove whatever content it wants as a private company. Of course they remove, alter or censor results and content in order to increase profits, their CEO is legally required to act in this way to fulfill the mandate of their position.

              • boff@lemmy.one
                1·
                1 year ago

                I’ve certainly seen and heard of Google modifying results or puting punishments on users because they broach topics that violate their terms of service.

                I will absolutely agree that the rules of their ToS are heavily determined by the desires of advertisers and written laws.

                But just because they may restrict the content based off of advertiser’s wishes or because they are legally required to do so doesn’t mean that Google is in bed with the government and willing to do anything to prop up the government’s power so they can keep making money from them.

                That’s a really big and important jump you can’t just hand wave away just because a company as large as Google works with the government on some things. That’s just conspiracy theory and detracts from the very real, evidence based criticisms we can and should be focusing on.