Does Search Engine Manipulation Effect Search Engine Advertising?
As presented in class, the goals and techniques for ranking webpages within the results of a search engine make sense. There are hubs and authorities, and webpages are ranked in a sense that the most important or likely results will be displayed first. This is a side effect of the modern web – the idea is now to narrow down the abundant information in search of what is the best to display rather than find the intended information in a sparse environment. Generally, this works perfectly: when you google “Coca Cola”, the first results are their official website and their Wikipedia page, satisfying the interests of most searchers. But what happens when Google manipulates search results for another agenda?
There has been lots of reports recently of Google manipulating search results to agree with a specific side of the political spectrum, to support a certain candidate, or to only display certain information about certain events. Many users claim this by comparing search results on “hot” issues to results from other search engines like DuckDuckGo, and many “whistleblowers” are claiming this is done at a large scale by internal teams. However, this is all unsupported by official statements. The only official statement made by Google to support any search manipulation is that they do their part to discredit and avoid the dissemination of conspiracy theories.
The point of this post, however, is not to give credit to conspiracy theories, question the rights of Google as a company, or to question their morality. I believe that the important question is the following: if Google is manipulating results due to a certain agenda, noble or otherwise, how does this affect their advertising program? For example, if Google is limiting results to a radical page such as Alex Jones’ InfoWars. Assuming Google redirects the user to other news sources, does this correlate to the user also receiving limited exposure to advertisements relevant to InfoWars users even though they were fairly purchased? If such a website is paying for ads on Google, and Google has decided to limit their exposure due to their support of conspiracy theories, is Google’s ad service, regardless of what is being paid for it, less effective?
While Google has the right to run their company how they see fit, and ads are charged at the per-click value so there is very likely no “theft” going on in this situation, many parties will likely get angry once money is involved as they expect to be exchanging currency for a certain return. Can issues like this lead to getting less value out of Google’s advertisements if your product has been classified a certain way, or will certain advertisers be less likely to take advantage of Google’s advertising if they believe they won’t be given as much exposure?
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-manipulates-search-results-report-2019-11?op=1
https://www.ccn.com/google-manipulates-search-results-former-engineer-shockingly-confirms/
https://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/29/google-manipulates-search-results-according-to-study.html