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

  • 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.