Digital transformation of an ethical beauty to greedy aunt

Google's transformation to an ad giant

Google, a highly ethical, beautiful and intelligent young lady twenty years ago, has been digitally transformed to a selfish and greedy aunt?

That’s what WSJ’s investigative article says.

Google always claimed that its search algorithms are objective and completely autonomous, and wont be susceptible by human biases or business considerations. But recent investigations and researches prove the contrary. By all these years, Google has reconstructed its algorithms and visibly interfered in the search results ; which is quite opposite to its official stand.

The investigation proves that, Google made changes to its algorithms to favor big businesses over smaller ones . Google has also seems to artificially boost major companies like Amazon, Facebook etc. Google engineers regularly make adjustments to the search results by working on auto complete suggestions, knowledge panels and featured snippets. These are over and above the blacklisting to prevent spammers or “generally considered” objectionable content. In the auto complete feature, the google algorithms disrupt and avoid inflammatory results especially about controversial subjects or high profile personnel.

In 2018 alone, Google has made 3200 changes in algorithm. Though Google claims that it is related to drastic changes in search pattern, the plain search comparison in different search engines prove otherwise. The WSJ investigation compares BIG Vs DUCKDUCKGO Vs Google results for the same query and demonstrate how different the results are. In fact I have personally tested with the text “Narendra Modi Crim” in Bing and Google and Google was clearly hiding the obvious search data at top layer “and stop predicting “ where as bing shows the most relevant suggestions. Probably, Google is still under stigma of saying Sorry to PM Modi for listing him as the top 10 criminals years back. LOL.

While the SEO tricks are being misused by many spammers to illegitimately get on top of the search results, the algorithms should be intelligent enough to surpass the malicious intends using new patterns and background information in the content. Google do so and so are the others. But it’s more and more clear that the mysterious Google algorithms exceptionally favors big businesses or those companies enrolled in its advertising subscriptions. Google algorithm now brings out lot of patterns as search results such as news articles, videos and snippets. The intention is clear. It wants to keep the user within google and serve him/her the information within that page and feed user with the advertisements as well.

Political bias is yet another controversy where Google has got into several litigations and there are visible patterns to prove that it manually manipulates the search results and can show the bias to certain sections.

Google seem to have completely “digitally transformed” from an engineering / academic/ research focused culture to an advertising mammoth vulture to become one of the most profitable company in the world.

Whatever newgen technologies we have like AI, ML etc, big businesses add “human touch” to it.

To add or remove salt and pepper.

To blackwash or whitewash !

Courtesy : “How Google Interferes With Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results” by Kirsten GrindSam SchechnerRobert McMillan and John West, Wall Street Journal

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