by DANIEL ANGUS
On January 13 the Australian Financial Review reported Google had removed some Australian news content from its search results for some local users.
Speaking to the Guardian, a Google spokesperson confirmed the company was “running a few experiments that will each reach about 1% of Google Search users in Australia to measure the impacts of news businesses and Google Search on each other”.
So what are these “experiments”? And how concerned should we be about Google’s actions?
Engineering our attention
Google’s experiment (which is supposed to run until early February) involves displaying an “alternative” news website ranking for certain Australian users — at least 160,000, according to The Guardian. A Google spokesperson told The Conversation the experiment didn’t prevent users (being experimented on) from accessing a news story. Rather, they would not discover the story through Search and would have to access it another way, such as directly on a publisher’s website.
Google’s experiment is a form of “A/B testing”, which classically involves dividing a population randomly in half — into groups A and B — and subjecting each group to a different “stimulus”.
For example, in the case of web design, the two groups may be served different web layouts. This could be done to test changes to layout, the colour scheme or any other element.
Performance in A/B testing is judged on a range of factors, such as which links are clicked first, or the average time spent on a page. If group A perused the site longer than group B, the modification tested on group A may be considered favourable.
In Google’s case, we don’t know the motivation behind the tests. But we do know a small subset of users received different results to the majority and were not alerted.
The experiment has resulted in the promotion of dubious news sources over trusted ones, some of which have been known to publish disinformation (which intends to mislead) and misinformation (false claims that are spread regardless of intent).
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