It seems that for a good few months now I am forever reading about how bad Google search has become, and how the company is freely fiddling with functionality (such as dropping "news" as a category in search is a recent experiment for some users, I hear). All with apparently zero concern as to how users feel about the changes.
This latest story in the Washington Post, for example:
People searching Google for airline contact information when they have a problem occasionally find bogus customer service phone numbers listed at or near the top of Google.
If you call, crooks posing as airline reps try to persuade you to pay to rebook a flight or another task. Your money goes poof.
No one knows how often this scam happens. But this airline customer service misdirection is common knowledge in the travel industry and among people who know Google.
In researching this article, I found an apparent scam number highlighted by Google when I searched “JetBlue contact customer support.”
Google has the power to ensure that it shows the correct airline contact information, according to three experts in the inner workings of web searches. In their view, Google chooses not to fix the problem.
I don't really understand how Google can ignore the outcry.
I have frequently noticed Google give short answers to questions one types in, answers that are either wrong, or incomplete, or without important context, or utterly misleading, or very very biased. It partly comes from the habit of Google of lifting short quotes in answer to the question from an internet page - the default page is Wikipedia, but it could be anywhere really.
ReplyDeleteThe one that sticks in my mind is when I typed in 'Is infinity odd or even' into google, hoping for some interesting websites. Google replied: 'Neither even'!
Two years ago I decided to use Edge and Bing. Both work fine, the Bing AI facility doesn't demonstrate any woke intrusions and is useful at answering questions. In the past I was disappointed with Bing but now it seems to be better than Google. Bing even has a facility to do the old Dogpile type of search where it uses other search engines to provide the greatest coverage.
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