Comments on Brightwork Articles on Google - Brightwork Research & Analysis

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Executive Summary

This article contains comments from the articles on Google.

Introduction

These comments are in response to the articles on business requirements.

Comment #1:

Your commercial explanation makes sense, and you are absolutely right that they still get goodwill from when they were user-oriented in the early days. But as users we are not completely powerless.

For articles written this month I include “Jan” and “2021” – it’s not 100% effective, but it does help.

I have found that word order and putting quotes, even around single words makes a difference: E.g. SAP Personnel, SAP “Personnel”, Personnel SAP etc all give materially different numbers of results, and at least a different order on the first page.

Then there are the negatives:
SAP -transformation does remove some results, although SAP -gartner increases them! (I don’t understand that)
And you prompted me to try SAP -SAP which is quite interesting!

BTW, something that seems to have changed sometime in the last year or so is that one’s location makes a big difference – I used to be able to get “as in Britain” results by using google.co.uk, but now Google seems to put more weight on one’s ISP’s location. – Richard Sage

These are all good points.

As for the first part of the comment, users are not “powerless,” but they are also using Google’s search when they really shouldn’t. And as far as users who are using Google search and providing information to Google, they are powerless to the degree that they have no idea what Google is doing with their data behind the scenes. There is a great power imbalance between Google and its users. And every year, that power imbalance grows, and Google becomes more entitled and more dismissive of users’ interests. Eric Schmidt once remarked that if you did not want people to know what you did online, perhaps you should not be doing it. This statement illustrates the absolute disrespect of user privacy on Schmidt, and this is a prevalent culture within Google.

This fits into the story that Google does not want anyone looking into how the results are generated. Google does not want people asking what their search engine’s biases are, what they are censoring, and how they are redirecting users to their services versus competing services. Google wants to be viewed as an entirely altruistic entity that produces a search engine to better humanity. They also very conveniently sidestep how much money they make from advertising.

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