• John H @JohnH6 Mod Westcliff-On-Sea - 1y

    Search engines. Part 1 - Google

    Please read this first: https://bit.ly/3wHX9CB

    Google search is not what it used to be. It gathers more data than other search engines and manipulates the results of searches. The results you see are based on what it knows about you, and manipulation of the results by 'SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)'.Someone else performing the same search will get different results, this is achieved by putting you in a 'Filter Bubble'.
    When you perform a search, at the top of the results you will see the number of results it has found. These results aren't available, here is an example you can try: search for Windows 11. I got 5,270,000,000 results, but there were only 10 pages of results available, giving 91 results.
    Google now has new and currently trending information at the top of the results, and puts older articles and less popular sites lower in the results, even though they may be more relevant to what you are looking for. You can also find lower quality results near the top of the results because the designers of the website have used 'SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)' to improve their rating.
    Another method that Google is using, to manipulate what you see, is 'AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). They use 'AMP' links in their results to show you their own ads. The results give you no indication that you are vising an 'AMP' site, and not the original source. Web designers are forced to create their sites in accordance with Google's specifications, or they will be moved down the search results.
    Google is well known for the amount of data it collects from its users, and the ads that you see on millions of websites are based on this.
    If you have a Google account, visit https://myaccount.google.com, and you will see what Google knows (or thinks it knows) about you, such as location, gender, hobbies, and interests, etc. Here you have some control over what Google can do.
    In a recent survey of search engines, DuckDuckGo was rated the best. This will be the subject of the next search engine post.
    As mentioned, please do not comment about other search engines in this post, you can do that in a coming post about that search engine.

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