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

  • Holyginz@lemmy.world
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    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
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      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
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        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
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        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.