Google Interferes with Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results

Ignoring the political and normative debate, I'd like to stress how complex the ultimate goal is: user satisfaction.

It's often surprisingly complicated to even find out what people want, even to themselves. And the game is partly rigged against search engines, because people typically don't remember the numerous successful searches, rather focusing on negative experiences.

I do think search engines have a (or numerous) problem, but the solutions are all non-trivial.

[edit] my favorite summary of the problems of fairness in search is the paper "The politics of search" by Laura Granka: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

Regardless of the body, the use of the word "interferes" is ridiculous. Just because the implementation consists of multiple layers doesn't mean any of those layers are automatically nefarious or not useful, or that somewhere between two of the layers are the "real" results.

(2019)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21544537

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21558386

During the Bush years, it was a meme to search for biggest idiot or something like that and it would return President Bush. It was a relic of an SEO project done by a group of people.

After Obama was elected, a few people noted that the search still worked and a few days later, it no longer returned President Obama or anything like what it did before.

This was all the example one needs to know that your search engine results are heavily manipulated.