Isn't this the keyword rewrite that had existed for decades? I remember they showing us similar slides during orientation back when I first interned more than a decade ago. The transformation from "kids" to "children" or "clothing" to "apparel/outfit" improves search results by adding more potential hits.
I am willing to believe that, in this particular instance, there is no evil intent behind the rewrite of search terms.
Having said that, the fact that Google goes back and forth on whether they respect the use of quotes to search for literal results doesn't make them any favors.
If I wanted to do what the article claims Google did, I would do precisely what Google is doing. So no surprises there.
I think the only way to know this is to understand whether google’s rewrites also impact what ads are eligible to show.
E.g. if 50 advertisers are bidding on “children apparel” and only 10 advertisers are bidding on “kids clothes”, then rewriting to the query with more eligible ad impressions is misleading to both the user and the advertiser.
Certain keywords are more profitable than others. Google knows this. One sure-fire guaranteed way to increase revenue is to reduce the % of long tail searches (since long tail searches typically have no ads at all) by modifying queries and swapping words around.
If I were a desperate exec at Google, that’s the first place I would look if I was in a crunch to boost revenue short-term.
Rewriting makes sense if they do the same thing to the material being searched. It has been obvious to me that the ads do more generic matching than the search results but I do not consider that to be evil.
I just wish they would leave alone the modifiers we can apply to actual search results. (And, for Google Translate, allow specifying that adult results are acceptable. Normally, with a term that can be adult or not you only get non-adult results but it's easy enough to throw in an explicitly adult term to fix that. Throwing in extra terms doesn't work so well with translate--that means it's basically impossible to get the adult result for an ambiguous word. What's the dirty word for the male reproductive organ? English has no unambiguous word for this, thus the translation is impossible.)
>I think the only way to know this is to understand whether google’s rewrites also impact what ads are eligible to show.
The other way to know is to ask Google directly (i.e. ask the company, not the search engine) and for them to explain what they're doing and why, in the name of transparency. Google could do that. They won't, but they could.
It's become more and more aggressive and dumber - it'll take "bicycle" and happily return results about motorcycles, for example - which is fucking useless. If I'm searching for "metal bicycle fender", I don't fucking want results about motorcycles.
At some point they went even further and started doing it even when the words were quoted.
