Testimony during Google’s antitrust case revealed that the company may be altering billions of queries a day to generate results that will get you to buy more stuff.
And yet their shopping search engine is still trash. It kind of surprises me that nobody has managed to make a good product search engine in all those years, they are always full of duplicates of the same product, fail to group related products together, missing tons of products, fail to take account of shipping costs, lack advanced search options, lack reviews and whatever. Steam with its user tag and reviews is reasonably good, but obviously just limited to just Steam games itself.
I think shopping part of google search has the same problems as the rest of it just more so - there is a fundamental disconnect between searchers wanting neutral results and producers paying google to direct customers to their products. The more ability you have to control your search the less ability they have to sell highly ranked search results to advertisers.
And yet their shopping search engine is still trash. It kind of surprises me that nobody has managed to make a good product search engine in all those years, they are always full of duplicates of the same product, fail to group related products together, missing tons of products, fail to take account of shipping costs, lack advanced search options, lack reviews and whatever. Steam with its user tag and reviews is reasonably good, but obviously just limited to just Steam games itself.
I think shopping part of google search has the same problems as the rest of it just more so - there is a fundamental disconnect between searchers wanting neutral results and producers paying google to direct customers to their products. The more ability you have to control your search the less ability they have to sell highly ranked search results to advertisers.