Convenience is killing impartiality.
Search engines are your second gatekeepers to the internet right after your Internet service providers. This is specially true for Google, which holds 70-90% market share across the globe. If Google tweaks what and how results appear on the first page, they change how a lot of people think about a lot of topics we continuously see in our news feeds. Google notoriously develops more and more of its own tools it will then change and puts in front of organic search results that will change the perception of the reader. That obfuscates and masks what a persons could or should see natively.
Take an example from Google's automated response machine that tries to find a single answer to an increasingly wider scope of questions. One particular search for example:
“Is Google spying on me?”
There are multiple things wrong with this approach. One is factual the other, as mentioned, is masked. If you know anything about Google's privacy invasion you know this is a total fabrication and to the uninitiated it paints a delusion that there is no issue with privacy on Google because Google said they don't listen into people's conversations. The factual side of this is that on my Android phone the microphone picks up snippets of audio and retains them. Well, it did until I turned this ‘feature’ off in myaccount.google.com. The strange thing about this is that none of us know whether this snippet is the remains of a longer piece, the whole piece or a wiped recording and this is the piece of audio to over-write the data making us think that it’s Assistant is there trying to help us in some way. This includes the Chrome browser.
Google fabricates many a statement and then argues against it. This question “Is Google tracking me?” has never been the core position of privacy advocates. The charge against Google is the lack of transparency and clear consent - as in my takeout.google.com experiment above. The average user doesn't understand how much Google knows about them and what they do with their data. Google artificially manufactures user consent through its vague and broad Terms of Service and complicated privacy settings. The data I got from takeout.google.com was about 105Gb. Bear in mind that the storage options for Google’s free plan (as too Microsoft and Apple) is around 15Gb that includes photos, docs and mail. The strange things about this, is that as I sifted through the archive, there is around 7.5Gb of audio from a slew of Android phones.
Even if people choose to opt-out of the invasive practices Google proactively tricks them into you still have a Google ‘trace’ within your browser that is almost irrevocable. With or without our consent, Google collects our location reads our emails, logs our browsing in search history, tracks your reading habits, your travel plans, your private appointments, your heart rate, your steps, your elevation and follows your purchasing records in offline stores. That's got a name, it’s called stalking, spying, tracking, snooping, snatching and it's ignorant and will very soon become the most dictatorial process to societies outside the future control of water supplies.
It’s important for students (and everyone really) to understand that this audio collection was never offered as an ‘opt-out’ toggle because the terms and conditions says so once we sign up to Google play services. The other kicker here is the app ecosystem (any Android developer) must allow all GPS to flow though Google Maps APIs. There is no other option. Probably one of the reasons why HuaWei doesn’t like the Google play store.
The need for instant answers are good for simplistic questions that have one exact real-world answer like calculations, the basic scientific and historical time-based facts leading to biographies. What's not in that Venn diagram should be left to the organic search. Organic search results means that all pages are indexed based on the search term and the content of the websites alone. That these are ranked according to how well these two parameters match. It's not organic when Google fettles with the somewhat boolean algorithm and injects its own set of parameters that appease the advertisers and marketers who pay for their results to be placed within the first 10 results. Or, based on where you have been, what SSID you’re in proximity to or linked within other parts of the web due to assisted trackers. Google should disclose that information each time it manipulates search results clearly and in plain human English. Google never tells you this why you get the result you get.
The search here, is laden with ‘snippets’ from Google (here) and sorted by biased algorithms. The search result at the bottom is the second ‘real’ result and is an online advertiser.
Organic search is so very important. Google doesn't show you what the Internet is actually about. It might show you an animation on YouTube of ‘spiders’ crawling the Internet to gather information, an anecdote about Pigeon Rank or a side-show agenda and this leads us to the second big problem with Google search: layout.
All you need to do is look at how much space a question takes out of the screen on a regular Google search page as it pushes organic results way down the page making you scroll and spend more time if you want to find specific content except for the adverts. Let’s compare that to DuckDuckGo the privacy search engine. DuckDuckGo places organic results in the center of your attention, an instant answer is on the side. As a consequence of this approach, Google doesn't include organic articles like this one on organic search.
Google’s search manipulation
As a quick test, if you decrease your screen real size while using DuckDuckGo, rather than taking the instant answer away it pushes the results to the top without sacrificing the importance of organic search results. Meanwhile, Google sacrifices search neutrality to favour its own services. Google wants to control what people get to see and ingest. DuckDuckGo strikes this issue head-on and Google struggles compete with the DuckDuckGo business model because it goes directly against everything that allowed Google to grow to such a monstrous size.
Instead, the corporate monopoly went for a different strategy. Google bought duck.com that used the redirect users to google.com. Which was eventually redirected to duckduckgo.com. However the pettiness aside, it shows that Google were a little miffed with DuckDuckGo’s creeping market share due to people becoming aware of their privacy being slowly eroded. The search Goliath stopped redirecting to its main domain after six years.
Typing is one of the most personal activities you can do with an internet connected device. Regardless as to whether you are in on a VPN, incognito mode or in a Faraday cage, your keyboard is tracking you. Use Swift or Gboard? see here
Search is a central tenet to Internet use in that it leads to the many aspects and media-laden platforms on the web. In many of these results, the content is collated in one of thousands of these types of sites, which, when politicised, has a trickle effect that builds within people. Ideas and bias sticks if the circle of pre-loaded offerings are manipulated as in the Google method above.
One of the biggest problems modern society faces with big platforms where media collation and promotion occur is that they create automated echo chambers around people's individual profiles simply to get people to click on ads. This so-called ‘filter bubble’ is plaguing the Internet in the case of advert-first search engines.
Google is over personalizing your search results to the point results would only be shown that align with their political beliefs and opinions. DuckDuckGo doesn't have a filter bubble - its search results are derived from over 400 sources that include big search engines like Bing or Yahoo and alongside Duck Duck Go’s own web crawlers. its organic results aren't intervened by personalized filters because Duck Duck Go doesn't maintain a personal profile on you like Google does. Google tracks your entire activity on the internet and even your offline retail world.
Google and Mastercard have a deal where offline tracking continues. (here)
Google projects their perception about what your next steps are going to be with the help of advertising companies, their trackers and their overlaid algorithms. The results of search and what Google connects you to is what Google wants to make you think, and as a result make you click on more ads by linked companies. What matters is not whether those ads work, but that what you see on Google is no longer the organic search you would expect from a traditional search engine like DuckDuckGo. You can easily measure how dramatic the difference is between search results on Google and DuckDuckGo especially when it comes to controversial or highly politicised topics. For example, try this one: Is climate change a hoax?
both searches in Firefox with browser settings set to do not track
At first glance we can already see the differences and what is completely absent from Google's results. DuckDuckGo ranks climate change denying websites quite high like Breitbart or globalclimatescam.
Why is that? Well, that's because an article like this lists the top 10 reasons climate change is a hoax or climate change in the hope that it will score very well with search engine optimization. Articles like these are going to be filled with keywords like “climate change is real” or “a hoax” “I think it's a hoax and here is why” “climate change is a hoax” “global warming is a hoax”” a complete hoax” “I call the climate change industry hoax” and so on.
These keywords/ phrases help search engines automatically evaluate how relevant certain content is to the original search terms in avnon-judgmental manner. The function of algorithms on an an article arguing for climate change is going to a favour some these keywords and this is not going to rank well with search engines even though the search term is a question in human language.
DuckDuckGo’s engine approaches this search as any other search term. Google on the other hand ranks NASA article on climate change as higher despite a fact it contains the word hoax and conspiracy. You might think Google is doing the world a service because it promotes scientific articles above conspiracy theories but you need to think about the mechanism that's behind the good intentions. There is no reason for this particular NASA article to rank so high on this particular search term.
Many people wouldn’t question the results they receive because for many people they are oblivious to the way the internet is presented to them. (See Facebook and the African Internet access)
In our example, on the surface it looks fair to a user who is consistently using one search engine over another. In this arena Google is making unilateral decisions on what should appear in its search engine and taking over a user’s responsibility for finding the right answer.
Google has admitted that it does manipulate search on purpose paving its way with another good intention to stop, for example, extremists where Google was promoting anti-ISIS adverts in some cases. However, somebody is there searching for propagandist material and again, you might say “great there are brutal enemies out there! No harm is done!”
But what this means is that Google is no longer playing a fair game, it's writing its own rules on what is and isn't okay to see without asking any one given user offered choice or even letting people know that these results are offered to you in the way they are. If you still think Google is on the right side of the offerings with these two examples, then you need to look no further than 2016 US presidential elections. It was a viral conspiracy theory that Google was promoting Hillary Clinton by hiding incriminating search suggestions that had anything to do with the word crime and Hilary.
In the Google autocomplete function, the search options automatically filled in “Hillary Clinton crime bill and crisis”. Do the same on Bing or Yahoo you get “Hillary Clinton criminal”. This went on until Google came with a their defense that they don't do it is with just Hillary Clinton they do it is for every established personality. For example Google filters popular suggestions next to ‘Donald Trump’ such as allegations’ misconduct’ and’ investigation’. If you enter Bill Cosby you won't see ‘sentencing accusers’ and ‘wife files for divorce’. When it happens to be the Clinton Foundation, Google filters out ‘scandal’ ‘corruption’’ investigation’ in a large percentage of results and changes them into the charity work.
Why is Google doing this? In an official statement, Google says its policy is to not show a predicted query that is offensive or disparaging when displayed in conjunction with a person's name. Not wanting to hurt anyone's feelings might be a noble cause, but this also curbs the free flow of information.
Google is an internet gatekeeper which for many users means Google is a primary source of information. In crucial moments during election campaigns, search engine suggestions about an incriminating incident of a candidate appearing due to spike in search volume can inform voters about something that could affect their choice at a ballot. Google could have decided to stay away from this by letting the algorithm do what it does best: showing the Internet how people is in native and organic results. Instead Google made a conscious decision to show the Internet how Google thinks it should be.
DuckDuckGo is surging in popularity serving 30 million+ queries per day but after 10 years of existence this is still a much slower growth than that of Google when the search behemoth announced to go public in 2004. Six years after its creation it was serving more than 200 million searches per day, and today that number is as high as 3.5 billion a day.
DuckDuckGo is still not a threat to Google but maybe it doesn't have to be, maybe all it needs is to be a choice for users to search the web privately and neutrally. Google doesn't like competition and it has a long history of anti-competitive practices: Google promotes its own review services before way more popular options like Yelp or TripAdvisor. DuckDuckGo promotes Yelp reviews, involves other services but it does not let it get in the way of organic results.
DuckDuckGo gives you several options to choose from Google wants to keep you in its own ecosystem - the walled garden - but there’s a price you pay for Google holding your hand at all time. It's too high it, cripples consumer choice, results in censorship and is, basically a massive surveillance state where nothing you do is private all because it’s convenient to go to Google.com and this is killing impartiality.