Google’s search engine bombards users with hidden ads and prioritizes big brands over quality sources, and a new report released Monday found that fewer than half of the results it spits out meet the needs of the intended search.
Financial website WalletHub has found that the world’s most popular search engine, which has come under fire for one of its key features being to not show results related to the assassination attempt on President Donald Trump, only shows advertiser-backed results in its top 10 results more than a third of the time.
Meanwhile, around 60% of the results lack transparency, according to the research portion of the report, which analyzed 48 of the most popular credit card and banking terms consumers searched for on Google with the aim of identifying the best financial products.
Google, which is facing a landmark antitrust lawsuit over its search monopoly, is the dominant player in the industry with 90% market share.
A WalletHub survey found that customer satisfaction is plummeting, with 63% of people surveyed saying they preferred Google search results last year.
“Google is reversing the progress we’ve made,” WalletHub CEO Odysseas Papadimitriou told The Washington Post ahead of the report’s release.
“I believe that once consumers reach a breaking point, they’re going to say they have to go elsewhere.”
According to WalletHub, only 41% of the top 10 results on Google’s search engine matched user intent, and 71% of users believe the tool is biased towards big brands.
Users assume that Google is doing the work to find the best fit for their search queries, but that’s not actually the case, Papadimitriou said.
Instead, Google’s search algorithms rely on user engagement data – seeing what users click on and recommending that content to future users.
The end product can become an echo chamber of false results.
For example, if you believe the Earth is flat and you Google “why is the Earth flat,” you may see results that support the idea that the Earth is flat.
“That might make people feel good, but it’s not true because people don’t go to search engines to hear what they want to hear, like they do to social networks,” Papadimitriou told the Post. “They go to search engines to find facts.”
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A high volume of ads can also make it difficult for users to distinguish between sponsored ads and organic search results.
WalletHub found that 58% of relevant search results that only show ads lack transparency about how they are presented.
These ads can be costly to users: According to WalletHub, the top product recommended in the top five relevant search results can cost consumers an average of $202.
Papadimitriou believes that Google’s penchant for pushing ads led users to start adding the term “Reddit” to the end of their searches, resulting in answers appearing on the social network, which is home to many open question-and-answer forums.
As users search for the phrase “Reddit” more frequently, Google is recommending Reddit content more frequently based on user engagement data, Papadimitriou said.
But he said that pushing Reddit to the top of search results isn’t a real solution, but rather like saying “I’m bleeding. Let me put a coat over my wound so you can’t see the blood.”
“People are saying, ‘I don’t want ads. I want to hear an independent, honest voice. Reddit is one of the places where that’s happening,'” he said. “But Reddit has its own problems.”
The report found that 84% of people would rather get better results from a lesser known brand than a more well-known one.
For some searches, this method of prioritizing big brands isn’t so bad.
For example, if a user does a simple search for “tomatoes,” a well-known brand might show content about “cucumbers” and a smaller brand might show content about “tomatoes” – you know that users will click on the smaller brand.
But when users conduct more complex searches (e.g. health or financial issues), they don’t necessarily have the knowledge or expertise to understand which results are better, so they choose the big name brands.
“Google could get content from a few big companies, and that would be a sad thing for the web,” Papadimitriou said. “At that point, I think that would be the end of Google, because people are going to [want] “An open web. Real experts. Real businesses.”
