Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here’s how it works. Say you search for “children’s clothing.” Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear,” making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren’t searching for at all. It’s not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don’t get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone, if true (the author used to work at DuckDuckGo). Pushing Google Search users towards stores that also advertise on Google just makes sense for the company. It is yet another contributing factor as to why Google Search has become so bad.
Now imagine what google (and microsoft for certain, maybe also apple) will be doing when they implement this at the os level with all that fancy ai hardware, where they can base such things on 24hr/day usage patterns instead of the stone-age information of search terms.
Not only what ads they show but also when they shove them down user’s throats, it will all be optimized for those company’s bottom lines. And they get to pretend it’s “privacy friendly” because it’s going to be processed right on your device.
The original article got retracted:
> After careful review of the op-ed, “How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet,” and relevant material provided to us following its publication, WIRED editorial leadership has determined that the story does not meet our editorial standards. It has been removed.