The Blurred Lines and Closed Loops of Google Search (wired.com) 15
Early this year, Google pushed out a seemingly tiny tweak to how it displays search ads for desktop computers. From a report: Previously, the search engine had marked paid results with the word "Ad" in a green box, tucked beneath the headline next to a matching green display URL. Now, all of a sudden, the "Ad" and the URL shifted above the headline, and both were rendered in discreet black; the box disappeared. The organic search results underwent a similar makeover, only with a new favicon next to the URL instead of the word "Ad." The result was a general smoothing: Ads looked like not-ads. Not-ads looked like ads. This was not Google's first time fiddling with the search results interface. In fact, it had done so quite regularly over the last 13 years, as handily laid out in a timeline from the news site Search Engine Land. Each iteration whittled away the distinction between paid and unpaid content that much more. Most changes went relatively unnoticed, internet residents accepting the creep like the apocryphal frog in a slowly boiling pot.
But in January, amid rising antitrust drumbeats and general exhaustion with Big Tech, people noticed. Interface designers, marketers, and Google users alike decried the change, saying it made paid results practically indistinguishable from those that Google's search algorithm served up organically. The phrase that came up most often: "dark pattern," a blanket term coined by UX specialist Harry Brignull to describe manipulative design elements that benefit companies over their users. That a small design tweak could inspire so much backlash speaks to the profound influence Google and other ubiquitous platforms have -- and the responsibility that status confers to them. "Google and Facebook shape realities," says Kat Zhou, a product designer who has created a framework and toolkit to help promote ethical design. "Students and professors turn to Google for their research. Folks turn to Facebook for political news. Communities turn to Google for Covid-19 updates. In some sense, Google and Facebook have become arbiters of the truth. That's particularly scary when you factor in their business models, which often incentivize blurring the line between news and advertisements."
Google's not the only search engine to blur this line. If anything, Bing is even more opaque, sneaking the "Ad" disclosure under the header, with only a faint outline to draw attention. [...] But Google has around 92 percent of global search marketshare. It effectively is online search. Dark patterns are all too common online in general, and January wasn't the first time people accused Google of deploying them. In June of 2018, a blistering report from the Norwegian Consumer Council found that Google and Facebook both used specific interface choices to strip away user privacy at almost every turn. The study details how both platforms implemented the least privacy-friendly options by default, consistently "nudged" users toward giving away more of their data, and more. It paints a portrait of a system designed to befuddle users into complacency. [...] That confusion reached its apex a few months later, when an Associated Press investigation found that disabling Location History on your smartphone did not, in fact, stop Google from collecting your location in all instances.
But in January, amid rising antitrust drumbeats and general exhaustion with Big Tech, people noticed. Interface designers, marketers, and Google users alike decried the change, saying it made paid results practically indistinguishable from those that Google's search algorithm served up organically. The phrase that came up most often: "dark pattern," a blanket term coined by UX specialist Harry Brignull to describe manipulative design elements that benefit companies over their users. That a small design tweak could inspire so much backlash speaks to the profound influence Google and other ubiquitous platforms have -- and the responsibility that status confers to them. "Google and Facebook shape realities," says Kat Zhou, a product designer who has created a framework and toolkit to help promote ethical design. "Students and professors turn to Google for their research. Folks turn to Facebook for political news. Communities turn to Google for Covid-19 updates. In some sense, Google and Facebook have become arbiters of the truth. That's particularly scary when you factor in their business models, which often incentivize blurring the line between news and advertisements."
Google's not the only search engine to blur this line. If anything, Bing is even more opaque, sneaking the "Ad" disclosure under the header, with only a faint outline to draw attention. [...] But Google has around 92 percent of global search marketshare. It effectively is online search. Dark patterns are all too common online in general, and January wasn't the first time people accused Google of deploying them. In June of 2018, a blistering report from the Norwegian Consumer Council found that Google and Facebook both used specific interface choices to strip away user privacy at almost every turn. The study details how both platforms implemented the least privacy-friendly options by default, consistently "nudged" users toward giving away more of their data, and more. It paints a portrait of a system designed to befuddle users into complacency. [...] That confusion reached its apex a few months later, when an Associated Press investigation found that disabling Location History on your smartphone did not, in fact, stop Google from collecting your location in all instances.
DuckDuckGo is clear (Score:5, Informative)
Re:DuckDuckGo is clear (Score:4)
startpage [startpage.com] is also good. The only way of beating "let's be evil" is to not use them and ask your friends to not use them. It is simple. Why not help your friends by changing their default search engine ?
DuckDuckGo is sub-par (Score:2)
I have set up DDG as the default search engine in all browsers but regrettably I find its results inferior to Google's, especially when I am trying to search for specific combinations of search terms or more obscure information, and too often I find myself repeating the search with "!g" after getting pages of irrelevant results from DDG.
i noticed it, (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, Google search turns up almost only ads now. And using quotations doesn't filter out garbage anymore either.
Need more/better web crawlers/indexers
Re: (Score:2)
DuckDuckGo [duckduckgo.com]
Ads looked like not-ads. Not-ads looked like ads. (Score:2)
That's the first rule of the anti-adblocker-club.
Jokes on them (Score:2)
best thing to do (Score:1)
Well that will not work for Android but at least neuter it using an "alternate" browser, stop all services and deny giving them anything.
I wiped them off Windows 10 locked it down also, Linux, and locked down Android [Opera browser] settings changes -- Never Looked Back.
Oh, and any page that wants my email or other personal info to find out what their junk costs gets shut down.
"Dark Patterns" are racist! (Score:3, Funny)
How dare anyone in the modern world associate badness with darkness.
This Brignull deserves to be vilified and purged!
Google search results (Score:2)
The bigger problem is not just that there are ads intermixed with the search results, but that the search results appear to be filtered (compare search results of Google to DuckDuckGo on a controversial topic, say COVID).
AltaVista resurrected (Score:2)
Does it surprise anyone? (Score:2)
Google and Facebook will only stop when being pushed back (e.g. by EU legal action or something like that) and will try to make things confusing enough so that the average user will pick the options that most benefit them while being able to claim that the user actually could ha