As part of the historic trial against Google currently taking place in Washington DC, we learned that the Mountain View giant’s search engine manipulates billions of search queries every day without users’ knowledge in order to encourage purchases.
The trial is being held behind closed doors, but a lawyer who previously worked for DuckDuckGo was present in the room during a recent hearing. In an opinion piece published in Wired, she reports that evidence could show that Google is using the queries to generate more advertising profits.
The search engine’s SERP algorithm would have been reworked to silently modify queries to generate more commercial results rather than “organic results” as before. However, we know that Google already transparently places ads on its results page.
“The ten blue links or organic results that Google portrays as sacrosanct are just a vector of Google’s greed disguised behind kindergarten colors,” comments Megan Gray in Wired. In other words: The user is primarily encouraged to shop. “Google can get away with this because these manipulations are imperceptible to the user and the advertiser and the company has managed to capture more than 90% of the market share.”
Google’s search engine has been the default search engine on Apple devices for years. Testimony in court revealed that Apple had discussions with Microsoft and DuckDuckGo about using their search engines. The possibility of these agreements would have served as a basis for Apple’s negotiations with Google.