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What's more, Google has been shown to be ideologically driven when ranking its results. Including, for instance, down-ranking news sites with left-leaning or socialist views such as the World Socialist Website, Common Dreams, Democracy Now and others as part of a concerted scheme with other information controllers like Facebook to marginalize ideological viewpoints counter to their preferences.
One can only speculate how much "meta-googling" (googling google to find out what it's up to) is rigged and cherrypicked.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of that skew might be their algorithm noticing that the great unwashed masses are looking for ecommerce. I don't believe that it's the masses looking for e-commerce sites. I think it's that Google wants people to click on e-commerce sites because it makes money off of those ads. And even if someone doesn't click on a sponsored link to an e-commerce site, that click still reinforces in their mind that Google is t…
I've seen people type "example" into the address bar, hit enter, then click the Google link to example.com, without realizing that they could just add ".com" to the end of their initial query and go directly to their destination.
It's what happened with Google initially. I remember the late 90's search engine landscape. Result were hit or miss, but one of a few search engines would usually give what you needed, so you had to try a few: Yahoo, Alta Vista, MSN, Hotbox... there were even sites the aggregated a few engines to provide results from multiple: I don't remember the name, but there was one such that had 4 quadrants, each one a different engine and you'd get results from all 4. It was my default for a while.
Then Google came along, and I'm not sure it always provided better results than all of the other engines, but it consistently provided results that were good enough that you didn't need hop around much anymore. And as we all know, virtually in the blink of an eye they dominated the market.
This is why I think they can be dethroned if they go too far down a path of weakening their results. Just a bit too far, and a competitor with a little momentum and word of mouth network effects could really gain a toe hold. It's a long shot, but over time.... there was once a time IBM seemed unbeatable. It took years of chipping away from multiple competitors, but they had a big fall.
> Recode’s Peter Kafka recently interviewed Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, and Peretti said something really insightful: what if Google’s ads really aren’t that good? What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? I’ve been thinking about it all day: what if Google ads actually aren’t that effective and the only reason they make so much is bill…
But that's precisely what makes Google "good at ads." They built the firehose. Own a destination where billions of people go everyday, find a way to measure their intent, serve my information to them. That = fantastic at ads.
Peretti is talking about quality versus quantity: maybe Google doesn't serve up quality ads, maybe they just serve up quantity ads.
The question of trusting Google's search results go far beyond it obfuscating ads in the results pages. Google's executives exert absolute granular control over what results end up at the top. Research shows that users are most likely to click only the top few results, meaning the this control has a massive influence on public awareness. What's more, Google has been shown to be ideologically driven when ranking its r…
I've actually moved to other search engines because the quality of the results have gone down dramatically. It seems like google will fixate on one or two keywords in my search (usually the most generic ones) and ignore the rest. In addition, the old google tricks like using quotes for literal values no longer seems to work. It is like google is guessing what I want, rather than trying to find what I have entered as…
Google ignoring what I had actually typed and instead showing results to a more popular query that was similar, but distinctly different, is what finally got me to switch over to DuckDuckGo. Now that I've gotten used to DDG I find Google unpleasant to use. The amount of ads and clutter on the page is distracting, and the organic results seemed ever more skewed towards ecommerce results.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't like Comcast, but at least in my experience, others I know and companies worked at, it's been surprisingly reliable. Used them at multiple locations over the past 15+ years and could count the number of outages or other issues on one hand. Is that unusual? Do we know what the data says about it? Statistics on uptime, ping, speed, customer response turnaround...
There’s a certain irony that you ask for data instead of anecdotes to chastise /u/blackearl’s claim, then provide a personal anecdote to support your claim. This seems like a reasonable start to build a case against Comcast: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Comcast
I included my anecdote simply to question the narrative.
What I'm looking for is proof.