Some of that skew might be their algorithm noticing that the great unwashed masses are looking for ecommerce. I should give DDG another try, it was not that great last time I tried (few years ago?)
Some of that skew might be their algorithm noticing that the great unwashed masses are looking for ecommerce.
I don't believe that it's the masses looking for e-commerce sites. I think it's that Google wants people to click on e-commerce sites because it makes money off of those ads. And even if someone doesn't click on a sponsored link to an e-commerce site, that click still reinforces in their mind that Google is the place to start shopping.
There was a comment on HN yesterday where someone wrote something like, "Did you know there are countries where people who want to buy things just go to amazon.com directly and don't search for their item in Google?" I was floored. It never occurred to me that if I want to buy something at amazon.com that I would involve Google in any way. But there must be legions of people who do this, or that person wouldn't have made that statement.
At the same time, I think that Google falls down at this kind of lead generation because it allows so much automation that it can't be trusted.
I just put "rocket to mars" in Google and the top results are ads for Wal-Mart and Michael's.
To be fair, the duck isn't much better. I just put "f-14 fighter jet" into Duck and got an ad for "Fighter Jets For Sale near you" with a link to an auto repair shop.
I've seen people type "example" into the address bar, hit enter, then click the Google link to example.com, without realizing that they could just add ".com" to the end of their initial query and go directly to their destination.
If you have a typo in the name, Google will fix it for you, whereas your browser will happily take you to a domain that is probably owned by a scammer.
One could argue that since Google is JUST as happy to take money from scammers for an ad for the keyword WellsFrago as the Registry would be to sell the domain WellsFrago dot com ... I'm not sure either approach is technically safer than the other if you're prone to typos. I think (gasp) bookmarking the important sites you need is the only safe approach.
My wife does this all the time. If she wants to go to Prime video she types "Amazon Prime Video" into her address bar then clicks the first Google result, often the ad for Prime Video.
I started doing that years back. I'm a bad speller and sometimes the url is example.net where example.com exists as some scam that I wouldn't want but looks like the real example.net. Google will correct my spelling and find the correct string to put after the name.
In theory websites could kill off googles dominance by blacklisting their crawler and only caring about traffic from DDG and other lesser known engines
If enough websites did it, google would become just a giant resolver for corporate content that everyone already knows about. It would effectively fork the internet into google and non google. We just need a few search engines that can compete of quality.
* Some of that skew might be their algorithm noticing that the great unwashed masses are looking for ecommerce*
Not necessarily. The great unwashed masses may not be searching for ecommerce, but people not searching for ecommerce may not be monetizable.
Let's say we run a basketball web site that has a search engine. People sometimes type the word "travel" into the search bar.
We can show them results related to the rules violation of "travelling," and/or results related to physical travel such as "trusted partners" who provide charter trips to playoff games.
It could be that we know that 90% of the searches for the word "travel" are for the rules violation. But the remaining 10% are the ones that click on ads. And we get a kickback when someone clicks on an ad on our site.
If all we care about is the web site's revenue, we might choose to prioritize showing travel to basketball games, even though we know it's only relevant for 10% of the users who query the word "travel."
It may only be 10% of our users, but it's 100% of our revenue from keyword searches for "travel." So we show the monetizable results, and maybe--if we are feeling generous--we'll show a little line, "Showing results for travel to games. Click here to search for travel (violation)."
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TL;DR: We don't need to assume that Google is trying to provide good search results for everyone. They might be trying to provide the results that maximize their immediate revenue.
