GoogleEnshittification
ThoughtStorms Wiki
Page for the story of Google's Enshittification
2024 : Fascinating story by EdZittran about the guy who has fucked up Google's search results.
2023 : CoryDoctorow on its "Enshittification" : https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/
But thanks to the antitrust trial, we're learning about more of these. Megan Gray – ex-FTC, ex-DuckDuckGo – was in the courtroom last week when evidence was presented on Google execs' panic over a decline in "ad generating searches" and the sleazy gimmick they came up with to address it: manipulating the "semantic matching" on user queries:https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/
When you send a query to Google, it expands that query with terms that are similar – for example, if you search on "Weds" it might also search for "Wednesday." In the slides shown in the Google trial, we learned about another kind of semantic matching that Google performed, this one intended to turn your search results into "a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape."
Here's how that worked: when you ran a query like "children's clothing," Google secretly appended the brand name of a kids' clothing manufacturer to the query. This, in turn, triggered a ton of ads – because rival brands will have bought ads against their competitors' name (like Pepsi buying ads that are shown over queries for Coke).
2022 : It's gaming store died because no-one trusts it : https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/01/stadia-died-because-no-one-trusts-google/
2021 : Good story on failures of GoogleMessagingApps
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