Google’s search engine is flooding users with hidden ads and prioritizing big brands over quality sources — with less than half the results it throws up matching the needs of the desired query, according to a new report released Monday.
Finance website WalletHub found that the world’s most popular search engine — which has come under fire for one of its key features, not showing results about Donald Trump’s assassination attempt — showed top 10 results from advertisers alone more than a third of the time. the weather.
Meanwhile, nearly 60 percent of results are not transparent, according to the research portion of the report, which analyzed 48 of the most popular credit card and banking terms searched by users on Google, with the intent of identifying the best financial products.
Google, which has faced a high-profile antitrust lawsuit over its alleged search monopoly, is the dominant player in the industry with a 90% market share.
Customer satisfaction is rapidly declining, with 63 percent of respondents saying Google search results were better last year, WalletHub found.
“Google is rolling back the progress it made,” WalletHub CEO Odysseus Papadimitriou told The Post before the report was released.
“I believe there’s a tipping point that consumers can reach … when they say, ‘I’ve got to go somewhere else.'”
Only 41 percent of Google’s top 10 search results match user intent, while 71 percent believe the tool is biased toward big brands, according to WalletHub.
Although users assume that Google is doing the work to find the best match for queries, that’s not actually the case, Papadimitriou said.
Instead, Google’s search algorithm relies on user engagement data: it sees what users click on and then recommends that content to future users.
The end product can be an echo chamber with wrong results.
For example, if a user believes the Earth is flat and searches Google for “Why is the Earth flat?”, they may get results confirming the Earth’s flatness.
“It might make people feel satisfied, but it’s a mistake because they don’t go to a search engine like they go to a social network — to hear what they want to hear,” Papadimitriou told The Post. “They go to a search engine to look for facts.”
Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The sheer volume of ads can also make it difficult for users to differentiate between sponsored ads and organic searches.
WalletHub found that 58% of relevant search results that only show ads aren’t transparent about it.
These ads can be expensive for users. The top product recommended by the top five relevant search results can cost consumers an average of $202, according to WalletHub.
Papadimitriou said he believes Google’s tendency to push ads is why users have started adding the phrase “Reddit” to the end of their searches so the social network — home to many open Q&A-style forums — will pop up with answers.
As users began searching for the phrase “Reddit” more often, Google — based on its user engagement data — began recommending Reddit content more often, Papadimitriou said.
But he said bumping Reddit into search results isn’t a real fix — it’s more like “saying, ‘I’m bleeding.’ Let me put a coat over the wound so people can’t see the blood.
“People tell you, ‘Look, we don’t want ads. We want to hear independent, honest voices, and Reddit is one place we know that’s happening,” he said. “But Reddit has its own problems.”
The report found that 84% of people would prefer lesser-known brands to perform better than more well-known brands.
For some searches, this method of favoring big brands isn’t so bad.
When users do a simple search for “tomatoes,” for example, a brand with a big name might show content about “cucumbers,” while a brand with a small name shows content about “tomatoes.” Users will know to click on the small name brand.
But when users make more complex searches—for example, about health or financial issues—they don’t always have the knowledge and experience to know which result is better. So they will go with the big name brand.
“You can end up in a place where Google can get content from several big companies. And it’s a sad place for the network,” Papadimitriou said. “I think it’s going to be the death of Google at this point because people are going to do it [want] the open network. Real experts, real companies.”
