Web segregation and deception

There are two webs. One functioning web for those knowledgeable enough to install ad blockers, and one dysfunctional for those who are not.

When DHH tweeted about Google's internet tax, people were shocked and replied:

Not until this thread started did I realize how effective my iOS content blocker was... google is shockingly bad with it disabled!

Same here. I kinda forgot that there are ads on google.

DHHs tweet was a retweet of another one, where people were stating the same:

Huh. Maybe it’s because I use an adblocker though.

It's obviously very common for technical literate people to install ad blockers and therefor experience an entirely different internet from those who are not.

As for Google, it's even worse.

It's bad enough that the search engine shows you full page ads instead of search listings, but it's far worse when you consider that only a third of teens and only 40% of the population in general recognize that those top placements are ads and not search results.

DHH wrote:

Google is not a search engine, it’s an ad engine. You search to find stuff, they respond with a full page ad.

It's not even an ad engine, it's a deception engine. When people don't understand that you are looking at an ad, you are being deceived.

One time I was observing a user testing session, and the user was told to go to our webpage. He searched for our very well known brand name, and clicked the first listing, ending up on some price aggregator site believing he was on our site until after a while the moderator had to interrupt and send him to the right place.

In Norway, ads are required to be clearly labeled as such. When most people are not recognizing the ads as such, they are obviously not clearly labeled and should be illegal.

Google is as much a part of the post factual internet as the social media sites we usually associate with the term, such as Facebook and Twitter. No, they are perhaps even worse since they have developed technology that uses AI to classify you business and show ads from competitors.

Competitors only need to state what they business they are in, and they will unknowingly highjack searches for competitors brand names. For instance:

• If Google identifies a business as a dentist in the Boston area
• And another business identifies itself as a dentist in the Boston area and buys ads listing itself as such
• Then a user that searches for the brand name of the first, will end up seeing ads for second
• And none of them might know that this is happening

This isn't advertising. This is forcing businesses to pay for customers who are already looking for them. Since Google search is the default action in the address bar of the most popular browsers, it is indeed as DHH suggests: an internet tax for businesses.

Imagine a restaurant A. Let's say it's paying cabdrivers for visitors. Not uncommon in many countries. Now imagine a customer asking a cabdriver to drive her to destination B. The cabdriver knows that this is a restaurant and instead drives her to restaurant A and no one involved except the driver knows that this is happening. That is shady. The only difference is that the cab is not free, and that there's not a very small text on the taximeter saying "sponsored destination".

Still, though. This is our preferred search engine? Our preferred way of navigating the web. That is sad.

22.12.2019