11 Comments

Try googling "Hal Varian" vs using another search engine. It's insane how much they're suppressing this.

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I did this and the results were essentially the same. What are they suppressing?

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Try searching under news and you'll see very different results

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Here are the results I get from DDG, Bing, and Google:

https://imgur.com/a/ba3Zz74

I do not see anything obviously suspicious in terms of suppression.

I do have to say that looking at all three, I'm not sure how one could argue that google is the better product. Google has fewer articles (this was a screen grab of the loaded page), less information provided to the reader, and headlines that are truncated rather than breaking to a new line. It's just not a great website UI/UX compared to the others.

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If you search for "Hal Varian" on the main page of each engine you'll find that both DDG and Bing will highlight recent news stories in the feed whereas there's nothing to see on Google without clicking through to the "News" tab.

However if you do a search on Google's main page for "Sam Bankman-Fried" it brings up the Top Stories widget as normal and shows recent articles. Must just be a bug preventing the Hal Varian searches from doing the same ;)

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Interesting. I see that now too.

Surely, it's just a harmless bug.

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Google WAS the best years ago. It sucks these days! Googles sea change shift of their search algo's to prioritize authority over relevance has made their results frustratingly irrelevant.

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Remember when their corporate motto was a simple, direct “Don’t be evil.”?

That didn’t last long.

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Great article bro

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It seems using the SSNIP test will be and stay relevant in this case.

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"The DOJ presented emails and elicited testimony from Barton that demonstrated the priority Google placed on ensuring search distribution deals guaranteed exclusive default placement. During cross-examination, Google attempted to show that Barton’s pitch to potential partners extended beyond revenue share — Barton testified that he also tried to sell potential partners on the superior product and monetization that Google search offered as compared to its competitors."

Could you expand on this a bit more? I trying to understand how Google was attempting show Barton pitching on things beyond revenue sharing like increased monetization. Are those not the same? Or at least, how does increased monetization of google search not depend on revenue sharing?

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