Wired has removed "How Google alters search queries" story

https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/

by r721 • 3 years ago

526 204 3 years ago

r7212• 3 years ago

EDITOR’S NOTE 10/6/2023: After careful review of the op-ed, "How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet," and relevant material provided to us following its publication, WIRED editorial leadership has determined that the story does not meet our editorial standards. It has been removed.

https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-...

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37740425 (4 days ago, 119 comments)

buran77• 3 years ago

relevant material provided to us

Sure would be nice if the material was provided to us too. Or write an article explaining clearly how the original info was misconstrued. Simply deleting it (edit: instead of replacing it with a clarification so anyone who goes to read the wrong info gets the corrected one) really sends a wrong message, both about Wired and Google.

r7212• 3 years ago

Maybe they meant a longer version of this tweet:

https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1709726778170786297 (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37802302)

granzymes3• 3 years ago

The relevant material was almost certainly the slide that the article was mischaracterizing: https://twitter.com/adamkovac/status/1710041764910846061

I wish WIRED had included this context in their retraction statement…

1270018080• 3 years ago

The relevant information: Google’s legal team

spondylosaurus3• 3 years ago

For context, the WIRED op-ed was written by a DuckDuckGo executive. I can certainly imagine the incentive there for DDG to misrepresent Google's behavior (and as I was reading the article, most of it struck me as speculation more than anything).

ETA: Okay, weird. The op-ed itself made it sound like she was a current DDG executive, but her LinkedIn profile states that she no longer works there (and is more or less self-employed now). No idea how to interpret that.

In any case, she was DDG's legal counsel and VP of policy for three years.

yegg• 3 years ago

This person is not employed by DuckDuckGo. They formerly worked there, and not for a couple of years. We had nothing to do with this op-ed.

Rastonbury2• 3 years ago

In the article, it stated she was an ex-DDG employee

jeroenhd• 3 years ago

It has been removed

Okay, but where is its correction? If you, as a professional publication that considers itself to publish news, unintentionally spread misinformation, you shouldn't just take down the old links, you should put out a new piece with the correct information (and give it just as much attention, don't hide it away).

The news came out, everybody got mad, and not half the people who read the original article (or headline) will revisit the articles and see the retraction.

Maybe the correction will come later, but I'll stay sceptical of anything Wired has to say until the correction comes out.

thinkingemote• 3 years ago

archive from when it was up: https://archive.ph/kmhqs

adhesive_wombat• 3 years ago

If you find that blocked, the Internet Archive also took a snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20231002123815/https://www.wired...

kevinh• 3 years ago

This tweet apparently shows the slide in question: https://twitter.com/adamkovac/status/1710041764910846061

thanhhaimai• 3 years ago

Isn't this the keyword rewrite that had existed for decades? I remember they showing us similar slides during orientation back when I first interned more than a decade ago. The transformation from "kids" to "children" or "clothing" to "apparel/outfit" improves search results by adding more potential hits.

probably_wrong• 3 years ago

I am willing to believe that, in this particular instance, there is no evil intent behind the rewrite of search terms.

Having said that, the fact that Google goes back and forth on whether they respect the use of quotes to search for literal results doesn't make them any favors.

If I wanted to do what the article claims Google did, I would do precisely what Google is doing. So no surprises there.

KennyBlanken2• 3 years ago

It's become more and more aggressive and dumber - it'll take "bicycle" and happily return results about motorcycles, for example - which is fucking useless. If I'm searching for "metal bicycle fender", I don't fucking want results about motorcycles.

At some point they went even further and started doing it even when the words were quoted.

lubujackson• 3 years ago

Not a great optics.

Everyone knows Google has been swirling the tank for over a decade for actual web search and AI will likely finish the job. The main vector I look at is how much control does the user have over the results they see? That has been in decline at least since Google+ took away the + operator.

Remember "did you mean" results? Now we get "let's assume you meant" with fewer and fewer ways to force "actually I did mean..." This is the obvious trajectory for any corp that needs to show quarter over quarter growth for 20+ years, at some point you hollow out from the middle until the whole thing collapses.

mahkoh• 3 years ago

Everyone knows Google has been swirling the tank for over a decade for actual web search and AI will likely finish the job.

Everyone knows this? GOOG stock is near an all time high with search being more than 50% of its revenue.

dubcanada• 3 years ago

A few things.

1. GOOGL is the voting share stock ticker, not GOOG. GOOG is nothing more than class c shares.

2. Search as a line item is more than 50%, but search is not searching, searching itself provides not much value, ads are where Google makes its money.

3. A stock being near all time high has no indication that it's a company that is "swirling the tank". Often a stock does not decrease until after a series of bad earnings/negative outlook. But with that said, there is no evidence at the moment that Google is not doing great.

billjings• 3 years ago

This discussion is partly about how Google alters search results to increase revenue. It would stand to reason that they might also improve their stock price and search revenue by doing this, while also degrading search quality.

As for why their market share has not degraded as a result, it is likely that the folks currently prosecuting Google for antitrust violations have the best argument for why this might be so.

mrtksn• 3 years ago

The stock price is a number representing the recent bets on its future price. It really doesn’t tell much more than that.

philistine• 3 years ago

A stock price does not mean that everything the company is doing is perfect. It can reasonably mean « their search is getting worse but they’ve found very good ways to make more money from worse search so I’m very happy and will buy more stock».

failbuffer• 3 years ago

I remember when you could query Google for x and it would simply say it didn't have any results for x. It was such a great feeling to get a frank, honest reply instead of being bullshitted with results that didn't have x in then.

mynameishere• 3 years ago

My favorite is when you fight and fight and fight, looking for something and then you finally manage to narrow the results down to what you wanted, and it says (right above the correct result):

"It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search"

Good job, Goog!

I remember when it was new, and one of the killer features was the dead-simple "innovation" of having AND searches instead of OR. To this day, I think that any search engine that queried based upon the exact provided search terms would eat their lunch. Probably not, but I would like it.

hackernewds2• 3 years ago

Would you rather have "There are no results for Hurricane Karina" than "Here are results for Hurricane Katrina"? Honestly..

0xdada• 3 years ago

This happened to me yesterday, I don't remember the query but I remember I was quite surprised because it never happens. Turns out I misspelled a brand/product name by one letter - Funny enough, I would have wanted them to correct my query in this case.

crazygringo• 3 years ago

What do you mean, you remember?

It still does that now if you put your search terms in quotes.

ToucanLoucan• 3 years ago

The main vector I look at is how much control does the user have over the results they see?

This has been the trend in so much technology and I think that's why there's such a slow, grinding, complete distrust of Silicon Valley going on. When all this stuff was new and interesting, you did a Google search to find stuff. Sometimes, by law of probability, that stuff was indeed something you wanted to buy. Now, all queries are subject to change so they can put a product that paid them for exposure in front of you, completely irrespective to if that product is relevant to your search or will solve a problem for you. Social media feeds used to be a chronological timeline of things your friends posted; now they are a selection, made by an algorithm you cannot interrogate, of the "most interesting" (judged on metrics you do not set and have no control over) things your friends have posted. Some of them today, some six weeks ago. And, between nearly all of them... is a product that paid for exposure, that is probably at least tangentially related to things you're interested in, but could not be, and more importantly, was not requested.

And, if you make the terrible, awful mistake of browsing any of these sites without an account, prepare for an absolute FIREHOSE of the worst, crummiest, most exploitative, total and complete bottom-of-the-barrel content, the widest possible net designed to ensnare anyone who passes by to watch a marketing grad in his 30's give 500 people in the developing world dental care, or whatever the fuck, set to copyright free music with as many ad placements as they can stuff into the thing.

Increasingly the Internet is not for us, it is certainly not by us, it is simply where you go when you are bored, the only remaining third place that people reliably have access to, and in true free market fashion, it is wall-to-wall exploitation. People selling their bodies because they can't get access to enough money to live, people desperately trying to sell things they've made because time cannot be utilized anymore without a financial benefit if you want to remain solvent, and of course, massive corporations posting billboards large enough to cover the sky, in every direction, every place. A new spot springs up, a new gathering spot that promises to be better, and it gains traction because everyone is so sick of the rest of it, and then in short order once enough people frequent it, the ads go up, the beggars appear, your friends are hidden behind a cylinder of recommended bullshit that surrounds you, and it joins the cavalcade of endless irrelevant nonsense that makes up the spaces you fled, just in time for the next one to pop up nextdoor promising it won't do the same.

God I am sick of the Internet.

Also apologies for the tangent.

noqc• 3 years ago

AI will likely finish the job

The SEO attack surface is functionally infinite for AI, and I'm not sure how any search engine is supposed to be good and also have revenue. The only way to make money is to get people to give it to you, and it's hard to imagine a world in which either a) people will pay for the right to use a search engine or b) companies will pay you to rank them fairly.

wslh• 3 years ago

Everyone knows Google has been swirling the tank for over a decade for actual web search and AI will likely finish the job

I think that's their hypothesis either. I don't think it is a coincidence that we are seeing more lines of ads in search results than ever. They are squeezing the cash cow. I don't think this observation is subjective but could depend on your location, do you observe the same?

cma3• 3 years ago

+ was simply replace with "". A very minor syntax change. The other stuff about wildly assuming you meant some unrelated, usually commercial, stuff though I agree with.

stainablesteel• 3 years ago

i see this as a failure of the marketing machine worrying too much about what people think rather than how to make money

johnasmith2• 3 years ago

The article conflated ad selection and search query results.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS• 3 years ago

Well, why not - Google intends the user to conflate ads with search query results.

johnasmith2• 3 years ago

That's a fine argument to make, but the article didn't.

LispSporks22• 3 years ago

That is their business model

Rastonbury2• 3 years ago

Ad impression can be dependent on search query, if they modify query to show ads, they make money they otherwise wouldn't have and worsen results

lozenge2• 3 years ago

Any way to make this stay up as long as the original?

curiousObject2• 3 years ago

Here’s a quick summary of the main points, I copied from the deleted Wired article [0].

Something important about it is this article, by Megan Gray was in Wired’s Opinion section which usually means the writer has more freedom to express their own opinions, and Wired does not claim this it is accurate reporting. But still it was removed.

How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet

Testimony during Google’s antitrust case revealed that the company may be altering billions of queries a day to generate results that will get you to buy more stuff.

RECENTLY, A STARTLING piece of information came to light in the ongoing antitrust case against Google. During one employee’s testimony, a key exhibit momentarily flashed on a projector … [1]

This onscreen Google slide had to do with a “semantic matching” overhaul to its SERP algorithm. When you enter a query, you might expect a search engine to incorporate synonyms into the algorithm as well as text phrase pairings in natural language processing. But this overhaul went further, actually altering queries to generate more commercial results …

The “10 blue links,” or organic results, which Google has always claimed to be sacrosanct, are just another vector for Google greediness …

Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here’s how it works. Say you search for “children’s clothing.” Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear,” making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren’t searching for at all …

[0] Complete article here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37802265

[1] A link to the actual slide, that she saw. This image was supplied later by Google apparently - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37802302

Edit: my opinion is Google should respond to the accusations. Removal of the article without a detailed explanation looks real bad for Google and also for Wired

blowski• 3 years ago

I don’t understand how Google makes more money if I click on the organic links.

curiousObject2• 3 years ago

The implication is that you’re being unwittingly directly channeled to certain sellers sites, instead of to sites that link to various sellers, I guess.

So the path to a potential sale is shorter and you’re more likely to buy (less time to get decision fatigue), and certain vendors might be prioritized.

I think that’s what she is implying

lozenge2• 3 years ago

I think they're implying that the sites get higher ranking if they are commercial- ie they display ads from Google. It still makes no sense though.

thayne• 3 years ago

Because google is also a broker for ads on many other sites. So there is an incentive to prefer sites that use google's ads products.

_cs2017_• 3 years ago

Holy shit, this article is such garbage.

And not only is it incorrect, it is obviously incorrect. The website owners do not pay Google for clicks on the "10 blue [organic] links"; so it gives Google no business advantage to make them more commercial.

cma3• 3 years ago

Since they have an ad monopoly they have incentive to link you to stuff that shows ads, which will in all likelihood be their's. Spammy medical sites with google-run pill ads vs the wikipedia page for the thing you searched for (often not even on the first page anymore for medical terms).

93po3• 3 years ago

The author is not saying that. They're saying google manipulates what those 10 links are to generate more money (bc of reasons like those sites serve more google ads).

tqi• 3 years ago

They did respond: https://x.com/searchliaison/status/1709726778170786297?s=46&...

Google doesn't get to decide what Wired does with content on its site.

xvector2• 3 years ago

X as a website needs to go. It's wild that readers can "add context" that's patently false or misinformative, and then X will portray this as meaningful. If I was Google, I'd just delete all index links to X: "Did you mean 'Threads'?"

jasonjmcghee• 3 years ago

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but it sure seems like this is for ad retrieval, if anything- not search results.

I've never seen a set of search results that felt like a different search.

My issue with Google results stems from them being low quality. Like all the stack overflow and GitHub issue clone sites before the real results.

I don't think this is wired getting bought or bullied- I think the author was mistaken and they retracted the story.

Google serving specific ads and optimizing that algorithm to maximize profit is expected imo

karaterobot2• 3 years ago

I've never seen a set of search results that felt like a different search.

They'll certainly ignore search terms, modifiers like quotation marks, and so on. If the result looks like what you meant to search for, that means they're doing their job right I suppose, but they are definitely only using your literal query as a suggestion.

(I did not get to read the original article, I have no idea if this comment of mine is off the mark with respect to the claims of that article)

Thorrez2• 3 years ago

Can you give an example of Google ignoring quotation marks? I've seen this claim many times on HN but I've never seen a link showing it happening.

Disclosure: I work at Google but not on Search.

rockskon2• 3 years ago

So why did they take the article down as opposed to only appending the note at the end of the article like they've done elsewhere?

It's long been rumored that Google coerces news outlets to publish (or not publish) certain topics lest they find themselves downranked or missing from search queries for a while or get penalized with adsense.

With the removal of an article besmearching Google, I begin to wonder if there's any truth to those rumors.

mst2• 3 years ago

The article seemed very strange to me, so I'm not surprised it's been pulled.

(my overriding thought as I read it being "I'm sure google does assorted morally dubious things in this area but this really doesn't seem like their style of evil, and I suspect the article is either a misrepresentation or mistaken")

joenot443• 3 years ago

Because in this case, the _entire premise_ of the article was wrong. You're welcome to wonder all you like, but in this case the obvious answer is the correct one. The author (Megan Gray) wrote a bad piece because she misunderstood how a technology worked, leaving Wired no choice but to take it down. Read the article, come to your own conclusion.

https://archive.ph/3a0wY#selection-715.112-715.649

When I read that I was floored - not because I expected even remotely that it might be true, but because I couldn't believe just how far Wired's quality bar had fallen. It doesn't read like a piece written by someone who's familiar with how the internet works.

abxytg• 3 years ago

The article was obviously horseshit -- and I hate google. But if your search for "running clothes" was getting replaced with "addidas running clothes" you would see clearly in the results. Degraded as it is, I still get results that include the specific words I searched in most situations. That type of replacement would be immediately and obviously apparent.

spankalee2• 3 years ago

The author read the slide wrong.

thrillgore• 3 years ago

Nah, this is totally a normal retraction.

sowbug• 3 years ago

The most likely explanation for the original article's false premise is that the author had a sketchy extension installed, similar to the ones that inject an affiliate code into every Amazon link.

photochemsyn• 3 years ago

Here's an article that summarizes the issue:

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-deletes-queries-replace-...

Personally, I dislike this approach by Google (from their response):

"It’s no secret that Google Search looks beyond the specific words in a query to better understand their meaning, in order to show relevant organic results. This is a helpful process that we’ve written about many times."

This is patronizing, manipulative, and condescending - and 'organic'? They've also been boosting low-quality corporate media outlets to the top of their search rankings for some years now (Youtube search is far, far worse incidentally), as well - part of this 'daddy knows best' mentality, I'm sure.

Google does provide a 'verbatim' option under its tools heading but this is incompatible with time-restricted searching, although perhaps not on the advanced search page. Practically I find that to get what I want from Google (search results from a broad range of sources) you have to jump through many hoops and write complicated queries for no reason other than to avoid their enshittification defaults, and that's a time-consuming process.

It makes Kagi look more and more attractive, certainly - the time-saving alone might be worth the monthly fee.

nickphx• 3 years ago

google is an advertising company, not a search engine provider. i would expect them to behave in a manner to increase advertising revenue.

granzymes3• 3 years ago

For context, here is the slide from the trial that the article was referencing: https://twitter.com/adamkovac/status/1710041764910846061

The author appears to have gotten the slide exactly backwards. She said the slide showed a query of “children’s clothing” that Google rewrites to be a “Nikolia kidswear” query so that it can sell more ads. But in reality, the slide is describing a fuzzy keyword matching system that takes a query of “Nikolia kidswear” and allows it to match ads with “children's clothing” keywords.

I’m surprised WIRED allowed such an obviously incorrect article to be published in the first place, particularly when it was by a known partisan (the article discloses that the author is a former Duck Duck Go executive with an obvious bias).

stathibus• 3 years ago

Unfortunately par for the course these days. At least they did remove the article. Citing "editorial standards" is weak sauce though, the point of having editorial standards is so they can be applied by the editor before publication...

diggan• 3 years ago

At least they did remove the article

Wouldn't it be better to add a correction at the top of the article instead of deleting it?

Deleting it I'd think would just fuel (current or budding) conspiracy theorists, as they can point to something that existed but got removed, rather than something that got corrected.

But in the end, it's probably a loosing battle anyway...

littlestymaar2• 3 years ago

the point of having editorial standards is so they can be applied by the editor before publication...

“Ain't nobody got time for that”.

The role of journalists is to provide facts, but the business model of media in the internet age is about “creating content” and “engagement” and they don't work well together …

jrockway• 3 years ago

I have always found this to be a weird take from a forum largely populated by software people. Every piece of software I have ever used has been riddled with bugs and security defects. This despite the fact that we have dedicated sub-fields for both (security engineering / test engineering). So when a journalist notices a bug in their article and has to "retract a release", how is that not what we do every single day?

I think you might just be disappointed in humanity, rather than any particular agency or person. Humans come together to get the right answer eventually; not multiple times a day, every day, without fail. Sometimes the software doesn't do what you want. Sometimes that article has a factual error. Eventually we figure it out. It's not the end of the world.

omoikane• 3 years ago

having editorial standards is so they can be applied by the editor before publication

Maybe there were lots of articles that were never published due to editorial standards, but we only see the ones that slipped through.

dylan604• 3 years ago

Was this piece marked as opinion or an editorial? Allowing 3rd party writers to publish isn't new, but back when we pretended we had standards, they were placed in an obvious part of the publication that it wasn't staff writers working within the normal flow of editorial process. i must be old, because a lot of my comments are now "used to be", "back when", "remember back when" type stories

cma3• 3 years ago

Yes it was marked editorial/opinion and said something like not the opinion of wired staff at the bottom.

BolexNOLA3• 3 years ago

Honestly, it just seems like something where somebody looked at it too quickly, got excited, and then didn’t look a second time. They are probably an experienced writer so everyone approving it went “sounds great.“ Honest mistake, but a bad one, and very unprofessional.

They retracted it so shrug

spankalee2• 3 years ago

It's not that either. Each column in the slide is independent, and it's only showing the rewritten queries.

So it's showing "Nikolai kids clothing" being rewritten to "Nikolai kidswear".

bart_spoon• 3 years ago

Wired has been a dumpster for quite some time. A low quality article like this getting published is entirely on brand.

listmaking3• 3 years ago

More precisely, the slide shows, for an advertiser who is bidding on the keywords “+kids +clothing” and has this sort of broad match enabled, three columns of examples of searches that would also match:

1. (because of [kids → children]) ads with keywords “+kids +clothing” would also match searches like “clothing for young child” and “newborn children's clothing”

2. (because of [kids clothing → kidswear]) ads with keywords “+kids +clothing” would also match searches like ”nikolai kidswear” and “kidswear outlet”

3. (because of [clothing → apparel / outlet]) ads with keywords “+kids +clothing” would also match searches like “creative apparel for kids” and “kids outfits”

That is what the slide's title (“Advertisers benefit via closing recall gaps”) refers to: the gaps in recall (matching) are being closed, by being broader.

The WIRED article misunderstood the slide, and was entirely based on the premise that if you searched for “children’s clothing” you'd get results for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear” which is not true (and would indeed have been “startling”, not to mention obvious, if it were true). In fact, the organic (non-ads) part of the search results in Google are always completely independent of anything in ads, something that the Search team in Google have maintained for several decades as a fundamental principle.

soraminazuki3• 3 years ago

In fact, the organic (non-ads) part of the search results in Google are always completely independent of anything in ads, something that the Search team in Google have maintained for several decades as a fundamental principle.

Are you sure? There's an email from the ads team proposing multiple measures to increase the number of search queries so they can reach their target revenue. One of the mentioned measures include "ranking tweaks."

https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-09/416646.pdf

figassis• 3 years ago

And I looked at the article at the time, and then showed my righteous indignation on HN. An example of why it’s important to dog deeper before commenting.

corethree• 3 years ago

I’m surprised WIRED allowed such an obviously incorrect article to be published in the first place

Is wired supposed to be a very accurate news source? I'm not surprised to hear bullshit from the media. This statement implies wired is supposed to be better than normal?

drinvictus• 3 years ago

Why are you surprised. Just type Google = bad on word doc and you'll get published

xnx3• 3 years ago

Kudos to everyone in the original thread on this article who immediately pointed out how confused and wrong this article was. It heartens me to that Wired recognized this and retracted the article.

mvdtnz• 3 years ago

Good. I was immediately skeptical[0] of such a huge claim. A lot of you were not, and I hope you use this opportunity to adjust your BS metres.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37740425

TheRealPomax• 3 years ago

Would certainly have been smart to say why it got retracted instead of highlighting non-existent editorial standards back when it got published. "This article has been retracted because it was full of inaccuracies, with the author misunderstanding the very basics of ad matching".

99_00• 3 years ago

When you print a magazine or newspaper space is limited. Lower quality content is cut.

With web publishing there is no cap on space. You can throw up garbage that wouldn't have made it as a letter to the editor.

And if it gets clicks the temptation to give it a higher and higher profile on the landing page is likely too great to resist.

justinclift2• 3 years ago

https://nitter.net/maldr0id/status/1710625763534201117

whb101• 3 years ago

Three words: the Streisand effect

eli• 3 years ago

That story is extremely thinly sourced and shouldn’t have been published. But once published I really disagree with the decision to delete it.

If you publish an article you have an obligation to archive it. Put a huge flashing disclaimer on the top of you must, but people should be able to read it on your site.

Removal is going to needlessly fuel conspiracy theories. It increases the power of the original story. You’d think wired would understand that.

dang• 3 years ago

The submitted URL was https://twitter.com/maldr0id/status/1710625763534201117 but I suppose we might as well change it to the page it's pointing to.

steve-atx-7600• 3 years ago

Wired who?

haunter• 3 years ago

Labeling anti-bigtech leftists with conspiracy theory is not a good outlook either. I bet the HN liebling Cory Doctorow will write another tweet-eassay about this [0]

0, https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1709221318284173443?s=46

hansoolo• 3 years ago

Is 'liebling' an english word?

gundmc• 3 years ago

I think it's German

Havoc2• 3 years ago

Google's rebuttal [0] seems incredibly weak.

replaces them with ones that monetize better.” We don’t.

How is injecting names of brands (that likely advertise) like "tj maxx" not monetizing better?

[0] https://twitter.com/adamkovac/status/1710041764910846061

andromeduck2• 3 years ago

The transformation is {kids, clothing}-> [{kids, clothing}, {children, clothing}, {kidswear}, {kids, apparel}, {kids, outfit}] for the _advertiser_ trying to buy adds on a query.

"tj maxx" isn't the part being matched, it's the "kidswear" in "tj max kidswear" that is causing it to match to {kids, clothing} because of the aforementioned transform

Havoc2• 3 years ago

I see. That makes more sense. Thanks for explaining

donohoe• 3 years ago

Hi. I worked at Condé Nast many years ago. I did not work at Wired.

I just wanna say that removing an article is not something they do lightly. They never do if because of PR.

They do it if facts do not match the premise. That is all.

chanux• 3 years ago

The article didn't make sense to me at all on first read. It was not clear what Google was actually doing as the author tried to claim. I just gave up and moved on.

Now it makes sense!

CHB0403085482• 3 years ago

EDITOR’S NOTE 10/6/2023: After careful review of the op-ed, "How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet," and relevant material provided to us following its publication, WIRED editorial leadership has determined that the story does not meet our editorial standards. It has been removed.

ISO 8601 tackles this uncertainty by setting out an internationally agreed way to represent dates: YYYY-MM-DD https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html

Thanks for USA for holding back a sensible time-stamp format and the metric system.

manonthewall• 3 years ago

Wired messes up from time to time, but in general I find them great compared to most tech news sites.

alpb• 3 years ago

“Google demanded Wired take down my op-ed, pointing to a single page I saw in court for only a few seconds. Wired sent it to me, and I said I needed to see all the pages shown in open court. Google didn't send. Without speaking with me, Wired deleted my op-ed.” https://twitter.com/megangra/status/1711035362326298795

1vuio0pswjnm7• 3 years ago

Wired may have removed the Op-Ed, but Search Engine Journal did not remove their article on the matter.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-execs-scheme-to-i...

No one knows exactly how Google alters search queries except Google. That's arguably the issue. It's not transparent.

But the point of the Op-Ed, if I understand it correctly, was not to describe the precise mechanism of alteration. It was to raise awareness that Google is altering search to boost ad revenue and the changes do not necessarily lead to better search, but they lead to better ad revenue.

Wired has removed "How Google alters search queries" story

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