<story><title>Google’s top search result is Google</title><url>https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/07/28/google-search-results-prioritize-google-products-over-competitors</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fractionalhare</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; A trending search in our data for “myocardial infarction” shows how Google has piled up its products at the top. It returned:&lt;p&gt;- Google’s dictionary definition.&lt;p&gt;- A “people also ask” box that expanded to answer related questions without leaving the search results page.&lt;p&gt;- A “knowledge panel,” which is an abridged encyclopedia entry with various links.&lt;p&gt;- And a “related conditions” carousel leading to various new Google searches for other diseases.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know, I&amp;#x27;m conflicted on examples like this. I see the point the article is going for, but I think it&amp;#x27;s better exemplified by the fact that there&amp;#x27;s a lot of advertising space taken up at the premium, top of the page on search results.&lt;p&gt;This example is not Google advertising itself so much as Google changing the features of the search engine itself. It&amp;#x27;s not emphasizing its own search results over &amp;quot;organic&amp;quot; search results, it&amp;#x27;s deemphasizing search results altogether in favor of quick, curated answers. Most of the time I can quickly tell what the &amp;quot;organic&amp;quot; source of the direct answer is.&lt;p&gt;I like that. Is there a way we could get quick curated answers like this without deemphasizing search results? Is that something most people would actually want? I feel a better point of contention is the number of ads, which I care more about.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cowpig</author><text>You like it in the myopic sense of the word. In the way you like a big cake that sits in front of you, even if eating that cake is going to be bad for your health.&lt;p&gt;Google&amp;#x27;s monopolistic business practices are the same: they are convenient in the short-term for you, but they are destroying healthy industries. Over time the result won&amp;#x27;t be something you like.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google’s top search result is Google</title><url>https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/07/28/google-search-results-prioritize-google-products-over-competitors</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fractionalhare</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; A trending search in our data for “myocardial infarction” shows how Google has piled up its products at the top. It returned:&lt;p&gt;- Google’s dictionary definition.&lt;p&gt;- A “people also ask” box that expanded to answer related questions without leaving the search results page.&lt;p&gt;- A “knowledge panel,” which is an abridged encyclopedia entry with various links.&lt;p&gt;- And a “related conditions” carousel leading to various new Google searches for other diseases.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know, I&amp;#x27;m conflicted on examples like this. I see the point the article is going for, but I think it&amp;#x27;s better exemplified by the fact that there&amp;#x27;s a lot of advertising space taken up at the premium, top of the page on search results.&lt;p&gt;This example is not Google advertising itself so much as Google changing the features of the search engine itself. It&amp;#x27;s not emphasizing its own search results over &amp;quot;organic&amp;quot; search results, it&amp;#x27;s deemphasizing search results altogether in favor of quick, curated answers. Most of the time I can quickly tell what the &amp;quot;organic&amp;quot; source of the direct answer is.&lt;p&gt;I like that. Is there a way we could get quick curated answers like this without deemphasizing search results? Is that something most people would actually want? I feel a better point of contention is the number of ads, which I care more about.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kevingadd</author><text>The definition of &amp;quot;search&amp;quot; or what it means to type something into the google search input field has changed over time, and that&amp;#x27;s probably the root of this.&lt;p&gt;It used to mean &amp;quot;show me web pages related to this input string&amp;quot;, and some of those search results were sponsored (ads). Now it&amp;#x27;s interpreted more as &amp;quot;inform me about this input string&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;please help me with this&amp;quot;, like a Siri or Google Assistant (though not necessarily in natural language).&lt;p&gt;When you view it as a &amp;quot;please assist me&amp;quot; query it makes sense to introduce things like answerboxes, related queries, embedded images or translations, etc. But that is VERY MUCH not &amp;quot;search&amp;quot; anymore.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s quite possible that most people using a search engine actually want an Assistant, so google&amp;#x27;s new behavior is ideal for them. But where do you go when you actually want a search engine? You see people complain that over time Google has become worse as a search engine - using it to search for programming topics is definitely worse than it used to be, and its search results in general are often full of astroturfed pinterest or stackoverflow pages.</text></comment>