Your Google search might not look comfortable
Google receives more than 3.8million search requests every minute and has an active daily user in multi-millions and near billions. The company is working hard and expanding heavily by signing up new engineers and introducing unbelievable projects and products.
Even though they have killed around 190 products and services so far, the company is still growing at a steady pace breaking more than a trillion dollars in market capitalization. The major income for Google comes from Ads on search, in fact, a big majority of the consumers don’t even know that Google has multiple products apart from search and Gmail.
Search
Google’s search provides information to billions of internet users worldwide in the form of rich media and content. Owning the total market share of around 90% in the search engine space, Google is the #1 search engine in the world.
Numbers apart, everyone uses Google to get information about a local store to what’s happening inside the government. The use case is so high that the congress is actually looking deeper into the analytics to see whether companies like Google can be trusted.
It’s pretty clear from the Google spokespersons that the company is never intervening in the search space with human hands. The system is completely autonomous and has its own algorithms to decide and predict results with apt information.
Algorithm
Algorithms are nothing but a set of rules given to computers to predict something as a result. The algorithm designed in Google, popularly known as page rank algorithm (in the past) ranks pages with information that matches the query (or keyword). The working might sound pretty simple, but Google has pushed thousands of small and broad core updates in recent times to make sure the results make sense to the keyword.
But wait? Is this all about trust? Do you think Google is actually manipulating the search to support the business and governments?
In a recent report published by the Wall Street Journal, the authors have seriously demonstrated few manipulations that could have happened due to pressures from businesses and governments. It’s very unclear whether Google did that intentionally or as a part of the natural broad core update which has happened recently.
The comparison between Google and other search engines such as Bing or DuckDuckGo (which is a private browsing search engine) shows some major differences in auto-complete results. It could be due to two reasons which are unclear, the first one might be intense pressure from the government or businesses and the second one could be due to data unavailability.
There is an equal chance for both to happen, recently companies like Google was highly scrutinized by government officials, also major companies like Facebook and Amazon deserves a space on Google which can never be changed due to algorithm shifts, so there is definitely a chance for manipulation.
At the same time, Google owns 90% of the search engine market, so the auto-complete comparison might not be viable data to scrutinize considering a 9:1 ratio. Moreover, Google has the trust of millions of users and webmasters around the world which is their major asset so far.
End of the day, whether Google has made manipulations or not, most of the users don’t have an option other than Googling it. Interestingly, the first thing we do when we hear manipulated google search is to search the query on Google itself. Consistent government scrutiny and the upcoming privacy policies supported by world-class journalists definitely got something to help us out of this mess, hopefully soon.
