Google: Too big for it's Own Good? Antitrust lawsuit may point in that direction:
(GOOG reports earnings next week)
Let’s Google together. Open a Web browser and search for T-shirts. I’ll wait.
Is the first thing you see a search result? I’m not talking about the stuff labeled Ads or Maps. On my screen, the actual result is not in the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh or even eighth row of stuff. It’s buried on row nine.
Googling didn’t used to require so much … scrolling. On some searches, it’s like Where’s Waldo but for information.
Without us even realizing it, the Internet’s most-used website has been getting worse. On too many queries, Google is more interested in making search lucrative than a better product for us.
There’s one reason it gets away with this, according to a recent congressional investigation: Google is so darn big. An impending antitrust lawsuit from the U.S. Justice Department is expected to make a similar point.
How does Google’s alleged monopoly hurt you? Today, 88 percent of all searches happen on Google, in part because contracts make it the default on computers and phones. But whether Google is actually fetching you good information can be hard to see. First, Googling is easy and free, which blinds everyone a bit. Second, we don’t have a great alternative for broad Web searches — Microsoft’s rival Bing doesn’t have enough data to compete well. (This is the problem of monopolies in the information age.)
Over the last two decades, Google has made changes in drips rather than big makeovers. To see how search results have changed, what you’d need is a time machine. Good news: We have one of those!
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine stored some Google search results over the years. When we look back, a picture emerges of how Google increasingly fails us. There’s more space dedicated to ads that look like search results. More results start with answer “snippets” — sometimes incorrect — ripped from other sites. And increasingly, results point you back to Google’s own properties such as Maps and YouTube, where it can show more ads and gather more of your data.
There are lots of times Google is still darn useful. I believe the company when it says it makes over 3,000 improvements every year, such as searching with your camera or just humming to find a song. But it’s also true that Google can bury better results when doing so helps it make money or prioritize another Google service. It can act like a bad personal shopper who organizes your wardrobe by whatever T-shirts earn the highest commission.
Google disputes my review. “Comparing the experience you get with Google today to the quality of Google in 1999 is like comparing high speed WiFi to dial-up Internet,” emailed spokeswoman Lara Levin. She said it’s incorrect to define results as unpaid “blue links” to other websites. “What has changed is how we organize the information, in a way that’s more modern and that hundreds of thousands of tests each year
tell us that people find useful.”
“ Squint or you’ll click it,” is how Silicon Valley publication TechCrunch described Google’s latest labeling shift, earlier this year, which removed a green box around the word Ad and shifted it up.
Levin said Google changed the design “to avoid clutter” and that in its own studies, people were better able to distinguish ads and results with the new design.
Believe it or not, Google also thinks we don’t mind the ads — and that they’re actually useful. Said Levin: “We have an incentive to only show ads when it’s valuable to people.” She didn’t answer when I asked what percent of queries now have ads, and what percent of the search results they take up.
Good luck if you just wanted to search for the most popular T-shirts. Google is working harder to make sure it gets paid for whatever T-shirt you might eventually buy.
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