“Ah, yes, you’re the guy that has a thing against Google.”
It wasn’t the best of introductions but I knew what he was on about. I do have “a thing” with Google. I am jealous as hell! Because a select few people in Google are literally the closest a homo sapiens has ever come to being an all knowing God.
This is not some conspiracy theory. Some time ago Google started hiding search results. Out of on thousand people coming to a website via Google search, almost nine hundred are now a blank slate. Google doesn’t tell us which keyword sent them here. “Unknown search terms” is their way of admitting they are evil.
Worse still, the kind of keywords not appearing in results is far from random. Google has used all their deep learning algorithm prowess to skilfully select categories so you can’t game or reverse engineer it. Even in languages other than English, their technology is awesome. 90 per cent of the planet is using a search engine which then sends them to results based on a completely secret method. And then it tells us nothing about where and how it did it.
So what? Well, for starters, Google can hide or promote any idea, product, brand or other entity. There are extreme examples, whereby a government or rich person pays them to do it. Relegating a search result to page two of search results is usually good enough, though I have seen cases where the unwanted result disappears completely after on phone call. Completely. Like it never existed.
But that isn’t the biggest issue. The real question nobody is asking is “how does Google sell all this knowledge?” If you want to know what teenagers in your region will be buying tomorrow, Google can tell you. Yes, it can sell you the information. The corellations between search results and real life transactions and trends are pure gold. Google knows if your next export idea is good or not. Google knows what will sell and what will fail. Much like they did with influenza, Google knows better than anyone at any time in human history, what is going to happen tomorrow.
All large organizations have more or less secret divisions. When Microsoft decided to target governments all around the world, they didn’t call the division “blackmail and coerce department”. It was lobbying. Unfortunately Google works in much shadier ways. Kings of industry have personal and secret relationships with Google. Not their “head of sales” or “head of Research and Development”. It is outside the office where this sort of information is exchanged. Like insider information for the stock market only much much more powerful.
Google not only knows which government will win the elections, Google can greatly influence the result. Google doesn’t even care, they can sell advertising and information to everyone on all sides involved. Their rising levels of secrecy and the pittance of data they do allow us access to proves Google is more powerful to do evil than any other organisation in the history of mankind.