The web is getting murkier, so we should temper our trust in
search-engine results
AOIFE BARRY
As we navigate our digital lives, we've started to understand that you
can't trust everything you see online. The person behind that profile
photo of a smiling woman could be a troll. That social media post about
the referendum could be disinformation.
We're also learning that even the powerful websites that today's
internet was built on can evolve in some unexpected - and irritating -
ways. When Google was founded 25 years ago, it was an incredible
proposition: huge swathes of the world's information could be accessed
with just a few clicks.
As the company grew, it had the power to make everything from printed
encyclopaedias to dictionaries useless. It made paper maps redundant and
anyone could feel knowledgeable about anything with a quick search.
The company was cleverly able to make money by linking ads to search
keywords. It also, crucially, algorithmically ranked results. It's been
so handy that we took it for granted. But now, a quarter of a century
on, a search on Google can return some unhelpful results, and links to
websites that smell a bit off.
It is starting to show the limits of today's vast, wild internet. Its
search engine is slicker than in the past, but the homepage can feel
cluttered. There can be videos, product placement and ad content to
scroll past. You might be shown links to sites you haven't heard of,
which are written in a strange tone, indicating they were made by AI.
Then there's the "people also ask" section, which can be helpful, but
can also get in the way of finding the results you want.
A German study published last month used product reviews on Google to
test if the site's quality was getting worse. It found that not just
Google, but all search engines (including Bing and DUCKDUCKGO, which
have significantly smaller shares of the market than Google's 84pc) are
engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with low-quality review content.
It pointed to a larger problem online: there are now more ways of
manipulating search engines to appear first. This is why, whether you're
searching for celebrity gossip or a cake recipe, you will find links to
unfamiliar websites among the first results. Years ago, this was
happening too - only you didn't have the sheer volume of websites that
you have now, or AI tools making it easier to replicate information.
In 2022, ex-Google employee Marissa Mayer was asked by the Freakonomics
podcast if Google was getting worse. Her answer was that the internet as
a whole is getting worse.
For starters, there's more information out there than the tens of
millions of pages Google had to index in its early days. To her, this is
an internet-wide issue, stoked by the "economic incentive for
misinformation, for clicks, for purchases".
Mayer is right that the internet ecosystem as a whole has changed. It's
not just Google that can be annoying to use. Cookie consent pop-ups,
which have been around for almost six years, are a good thing for users.
But what should be an easy process has become an education in "dark
patterns", with some websites finding sneaky ways of getting you to
agree to having your cookies tracked, or being so confusing that you
click "yes" out of frustration.
Early websites look naive and clunky to our eyes today, but they also
seem like a dream compared to the forest of pop-ups we now have to wade
through.
I recently visited the website of a US publication and had to click past
a cookie pop-up and an advertising pop-up - only to have multiple video
pop-ups obscure part of what I was reading. This surely wasn't the
internet we were promised 20 years ago.
Google is working on using generative AI to improve its searches, with
the hope it will make its results more useful. But we know that
generative AI can "hallucinate" some information, which is something it
will have to tackle.
Last year, if you googled "tank man" to find the famous photograph of
the Tiananmen Square protester, one picture that appeared high up in
search results was an AI-generated image of "tank man" taking a selfie.
Technology, like humans, is fallible. But as we mark significant
anniversaries for our mostused, game-changing tech companies (Facebook
celebrates 20 years tomorrow), it's also a time to pay close attention
to how they've changed, and if they remain as useful to us as they once
were.
They're so embedded in our lives that it can be easy to get complacent.
Even in the past 18 months, we've witnessed Twitter's evolution into X,
and how a change of ownership can make a site radically change for the
worse.
The lesson seems to be that, for as much as they have improved how we
live, the internet's behemoths are still susceptible to being made worse
by growth and technological evolution.
We simply can't put all of our digital eggs in one online basket. It's
not about switching off completely, but not forgetting there's an
analogue world of information out there too that we need to stay tapped
into.
These sites are hugely powerful, and regulation is patchy. The internet
will continue to change, but we have to accept there's no guarantee that
the sites we've long used will keep changing for the better.
Irish Independent Technology
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