The Google Pixel: How Search Engines May Deviate from Their Algorithms
https://www.cnet.com/products/google-pixel-phone/preview/
Google is set to release the first smartphone fully developed by their company with no outsider input, the Pixel and the Pixel XL on Thursday, October 20th. While the tech world and the gadget manias all around have been following the development process for this new smartphone for quite a while, the release has largely flown under the radar for the general public. Of course, Google has done the utmost to advertise its new phone; type “Pixel” or even “phone” on the search bar of just about any electronics website today, and you are basically guaranteed to be showered with content about the phone. Nonetheless, it is quite clear that Google’s new project is getting nowhere near the hype or publicity compared to the recent release of the iPhone 7, which will be the Pixel’s main competitor along with the lineup from Samsung.
Needless to say, Google has a major financial incentive to show every person that comes across their search engine something about its product, and the lukewarm reception of the Pixel so far begs the question of whether Google is in any way manipulating the search results for related keywords. A quick comparison between Google, Bing, Yahoo, AOL, and Ask.com showed quite convincingly that Google is indeed manipulating the rank of the results for its searches. The search word “Pixel” on Google yielded as the top 2 results, Google’s own webpage for the new phone, and the Google store product page for Pixel. In fact, the only website unrelated to the phone itself was the Wikipedia page for pixels as the 3rd website; the rest of the search were news about the phone’s release, reviews, technical specifications, and other related pages.
Compare now, these results to the results for the exact same search word for Bing, Yahoo, AOL, and Ask.com: the top results for every single search engine besides Google revolved around the Wikipedia page, a movie, dictionary definitions and online games. While some speculation as to whether Bing is modifying its results (shown on the right picture; left is Google) may be cast, as Microsoft is a potential competitor in the phone market, cross-listing the same results with 3 other search engines shows that all non-Google engines are following similar algorithms to rank the web results.
Pixel’s new release provides an interesting insight into how the academic and conceptual aspect of search engines and its ranking algorithm fits into the real world where companies have incentives and goals outside of providing a functional search engine. While advertising a smartphone seems innocuous enough, the possibility of search engines incorporating biases of a political or social nature poses new, interesting ethical concerns and whether major companies should be held responsible.