Google’s “Commitment to Transparency” lacks Transparency

Google has been and is still one of the foremost search engines on the internet and has been instrumental in making search engines a household name. The name Google was synonymous with search engine service and it is what catapulted the organization into what it is today. Google’s foray into other internet services such as social networking and blogging has been possible owing to its already established popularity among users.

But off late there has been a decline in the transparency of the results that crop up when you key in a query. A year ago there was a blog post talking about Google’s commitment to transparency and the methods it is implementing to go about it. Danny Sullivan had said, “It’s a nice move to help searchers know what exactly is going on ‘under the hood’ at Google and override it if the wrong choices are being made. I’d like to see more of it.”

Well Danny would be disappointed if he ran a search, now, on the Google search engine. Search engine optimization techniques are no secret. Every search engine employs it and at times way below the belt. But all the pain is undertaken by search engines to make the experience simpler. It is a well known fact that Google modifies the results based on your search history and your location. This was implemented with a view to make the search process more relevant as relevancy is what search engines are all about.

But now when you key in your query, Google overrides it with its option which it determines from our past history and location. In a way it claims to know better than what the users actually intends to search for. This may be a move by Google to make the search engine more user-friendly but that does not explain why the actual search keyword, keyed in by the user, appears at the bottom of the drop box. If it was all about transparency the user’s original keyword must appear first on the list.

Same is the case with personalization messages that would appear when your search was modified by your past preferences. The messages do appear but way down below where most users would miss it. Original search queries are replaced automatically with the corrected ones without any consent of the user.

If Google intends to maintain its popularity in the market by doing so, it is going way off track.

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