Have you noticed the increasing uselessness of Google — and search engines — generally?

© 2018 Peter Free

 

20 April 2018

 

 

I remember a time when — Internet search engines found useful links

 

Not so much, anymore.

 

These days they spew up the same things, from the same obviously limited number of sources, over and over again.

 

 

Try an experiment

 

Type in any car brand and model and add "towing capacity."

 

For most models, you will be greeted with pages of dealerships and other advertisers claiming to answer, but not answering the question.

 

Even when a proposed capacity number is listed in the Google results, that number often does not appear in the clicked upon link.

 

 

Similarly annoying

 

Notice how often Amazon.com and other major retailers pop up, pretending to have the product you want, when they do not?

 

Google and Ilk are about serving high traffic advertisers.

 

As a public, we are covertly strong-armed into visiting websites that often have little to do with what we are looking for, or to an arguably important (often regional) commerical elite.

 

 

Here is a minor example

 

I have been looking, online, for a lightweight utility trailer. For months, I've plugged in all manner of keywords. I get a tiresomely same and very limited list of identical advertisers every time. And many of those are selling steel, rather than aluminum.

 

Two days ago, by chance, I tripped over a product review attached to a website that had never been listed in my Google results. Dock Doctors stocks aluminum "paddlesport" trailers that I might be able to modify to suit my purposes.

 

I wondered whether Google's previous unproductive string of results (with regard to Dock Doctors) amounted to discrimination against small guys or those who don't pay.

 

Out of curiosity, I retraced my Google search steps.

 

I had to use "aluminum kayak trailers" to find Dock Doctors' trailers.

 

A search for "aluminum trailers" did not turn the business up — despite the fact that Dock Doctors has:

 

 

"utility trailer" — as page heading for each of 7 trailer models

 

"aluminum frame trailer" — in the topic heading for each of those

 

"aluminum frame trailers" — as the descriptive summary list of those trailers

 

as well as

 

"utility trailers" — prominently listed on the Dock Doctors site-map.

 

 

Indicatively, most of the retailers that preceded Dock Doctors in my searches, including the "aluminum trailers" one in which Dock Doctors did not even show up, frequently did not prominently attach those same words to their own pages.

 

 

 

The moral? — Search engines will track your own buying interests, but . . .

 

. . . when you need something specific from a non-giant source, they will not find it for you.

 

Search engines' professed ability to expand our knowledge base has soured under Greed's onslaught.

 

Our capitalistic Internet model can be as limiting as totalitarian censorship is. Just in different ways.

 

Parasitic propaganda, like brainwashing in totalitarian countries, prevents most of us from recognizing these limitations.

 

Contemplate how search engines' hidden restrictions shape and limit our views of the world.

 

Notice also how Google delists websites for political reasons.

 

In consequence, whenever I find a source of useful information or alternative perspectives, I bookmark it. Knowing that I will otherwise probably never find it again.