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Evidence that Google skews search results

2 pointsby treefire86almost 10 years ago

1 comment

Nadyaalmost 10 years ago
<i>&gt;The team then randomly displayed one of the two sets of results to 2,690 subjects. What they found was that users were 45-percent more likely to actually click through the search results on the second version, which included only organic results. What that means, they write, is that by prizing OneBox over organic links Google is serving up less useful search results, which is therefore damaging to the end user.</i><p>Or that users obtained the information they needed from OneBox and, therefore, were not required to click on a link - making the search results <i>more</i> useful. Search should be defined as &quot;obtained the information I was searching for&quot; and not &quot;clicked through to a website.&quot;<p>Counterpoint example:<p>Searching google for &quot;define &#x27;word&#x27;&quot; gives me the definition of the word in OneBox without me having to click to dictionary.com or merriam-webster or any other similar online dictionary. The result? A better search result that doesn&#x27;t require an additional click-through!<p>E:<p><i>&gt;The problem with all this is that, generally, even though they are the ones being harmed, consumers don’t care all that much—at least not enough to change their habits.</i><p>Am I the only one to find fault with this claim? If users don&#x27;t give a shit, has it ever occurred to these people that maybe, just maybe, users aren&#x27;t being harmed and therefore... don&#x27;t give a shit? If Google didn&#x27;t provide the information that people wanted when they searched for something, they would do this amazing thing called <i>use another search engine</i>.