APRIL 17, 2014
LITTLE LIES THE INTERNET TOLD ME
Everyone knows about the big Internet scams: the e-mails advertising
diet pills, the proposed Nigerian bank transfers. But we tend to
overlook the milder forms of truth-stretching that have come to
shape online living, and it’s hard not to. They’re often perpetuated
by big and reputable companies, like Apple, Seamless, and Amazon.
Take search. General search sites, like Google and Bing, are pretty
straightforward: you type in a query and get results ranked by some
measure of relevance; you also see clearly marked advertisements.
This experience tends to shape our expectation that searches deliver
relevant results. But the same search on sites like Amazon or
Seamless turns up not only relevant results but disguised
advertisements, as well. As George Packer recently wrote in the
magazine, “Few customers realize that the results generated by
Amazon’s search engine are partly determined by promotional fees.”
GrubHub Seamless, the merged food-delivery engine, recently revealed
in an S.E.C. filing that “restaurants can choose their level of
commission rate … to affect their relative priority in sorting
algorithms, with restaurants paying higher commission rates
generally appearing higher in the search order than restaurants
paying lower commission rates.”
[...]
Continua qui:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/04/little-lies-the-internet-told-me.html