AT&T has started to manipulate the Google search results [telecom]
From
Bill Horne@21:1/5 to
All on Tue Sep 13 15:42:10 2022
I'm writing to ask your help once again.
Most of the source material I quote in the Digest comes from online
searches. For some time now, Centurylink has been able to hide
embarrassing or other news that the company doesn't want to show up on
Google searches, apparently using Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
techniques which crowd out all search results that appear in English
with those from sites which publish in other languages.
Of course, I've tried other search engines, but with dismal results:
neither Bing or Yahoo yield anything newsworthy on most days: if there
are other choices worth using, I'd like to know about them.
Now, AT&T has adopted tactics similar to Centurylink's. Today's search
for news about AT&T produced a "splash" page that showed reports about
failures in the 911 system at Baton Rouge, LA - but nothing else in
English.
Google searches appear to be limited to eight pages of results, at
least when searching in the "News" category. If part of the first
page, and all seven of the rest, show results written in other
languages, well, that effectively causes news about AT&T to vanish
from the screens of those whom don't read other languages - those like
me. Yahoo goes on for page after page, if I have the patience to wade
through them: after about page eight, the search results start
repeating the same links, straying off the topic, and getting less and
less usable at each page view. Bing is in-between, but it has a lot
more unrelated content.
Today, I was able to find an interesting article written in Spanish,
and the Google "Translate" feature gave a usable result for it, but
Google doesn't, AFAICT, have any way to limit search results to pages
written only in English.
If you know a way around this problem, or know where I can find one,
please contact me. I can't pay you, but I'll be happy to publish a
public "Thank you" for you or your organization.
Bill Horne
Moderator
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