this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
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More interesting is what came out during the deposition: Google straight up changes your search terms to give you results that trigger paid advertisements. Eg if you search for "children's shirts" it will swap for "[brandname] shirts" and show you ads for that brand.
Does it swap search terms just for the portion that returns the ad or for the search as well? If it's just the ad, that doesn't seem very problematic, just an implementation detail on how it chooses which ad to show. If it's for the search as well, I don't see how that would benefit Google. They wouldn't be able to consider a search result click a successful conversion if it wasn't an actual advertisement.
I read about this in a blog post on Wired, written by someone who was there (former executive of DuckDuckGo). He also mentioned how they may benefit from having results that aren't quite accurate, as then you spend more time searching, which means more time to serve you ads. There is an inherent conflict of interest between adverts and fast search engines.
Paywalled! Fuckin Wired.
That's an interesting one, give up a bit of user experience for increased ad impressions. Pretty clever, but breaks all kinds of anti-competition laws if true.
I find it really ironic that ads and a paywall are being complained about in the same thread
Different users lol. I think I'm one of the few Lemmy users that doesn't care about ads...
If the ads were targeted to people searching for [brandname] then that would be straight up illegal. Companies would have a slam dunk case in court.
That's the thing though, proving it would be next to impossible.
A subpoena would do the trick. Their employees aren’t going to jail for obstruction to protect Google.
You need some reasonable grounds to put before a judge before they'll grant a subpoena. A subpoena can confirm what they suspect, it can't be used to blindly fish for evidence.
However it could be that what was in the deposition gives them the grounds. Should be an interesting trial.