Google’s search engine inundates users with hidden ads and prioritizes major brands over quality sources — with less than half the results that it spits out meeting the needs of the intended query, according to a new report released Monday.
Finance website WalletHub found that the world’s most popular search engine — which has come under fire for one of its key features failing to show results for the attempted assassination of Donald Trump — displays top 10 results only from advertisers more than a third of the time.
Meanwhile, nearly 60% of the results are not transparent, according to the study portion of the report, which analyzed 48 of the most popular credit card and banking terms searched by consumers on Google with the intent of identifying the best financial products.
Google, which is facing a landmark antitrust lawsuit over its alleged monopoly of search, is the dominant player in the industry with a 90% market share.
Customer satisfaction is quickly dropping, with 63% surveyed saying that Google search results were better last year, WalletHub found.
“Google is reverting progress it had made,” WalletHub CEO Odysseas Papadimitriou told The Post ahead of the report’s release.
“I do believe that there is a breaking point that consumers can reach…when they say I need to go elsewhere.”
Only 41% of the top 10 Google search engine results met the user’s intent, while 71% think the tool has a big-brand bias, according to WalletHub.
Although users assume that Google does the work to find the best match for queries, this is not actually the case, Papadimitriou said.
Instead, Google’s search algorithm relies on user engagement data: seeing what users click on and then recommending that content to future users.
The end product can be an echo chamber of faulty results.
For example, if a user believes the Earth is flat and googles, “Why is the Earth flat?” they may get results confirming the Earth’s flatness.
“That can make people feel like they’re satisfied, but that’s a mistake because they don’t go to a search engine like they go to a social network – to hear what they want to hear,” Papadimitriou told The Post. “They go to a search engine to look up facts.”
Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The high amount of ads also can make it difficult for users to differentiate between sponsored advertisements and organic searches.
WalletHub found that 58% of the relevant search results that display only advertisements are not transparent about doing so.
Those ads can be costly to the users. The top product recommended by the first five relevant search results could cost consumers an average of $202, according to WalletHub.
Papadimitriou said he believes Google’s tendency to push ads is why users have started adding the phrase “Reddit” to the end of their searches, so the social network – home to lots of Q&A style open forums – will pop up with answers.
Since users started searching the phrase “Reddit” more often, Google – based on its user engagement data – began recommending Reddit content more often, Papadimitriou said.
But he said bumping Reddit in search results is not a real fix – rather, it is like “saying I’m bleeding. Let me put a coat over the wound so people don’t see the blood.”
“People are telling you, look. We don’t want ads. We want to hear independent, honest voices and Reddit is one place we know that is happening,” he said. “But Reddit has its own issues.”
The report found that 84% of people would prefer better results from less well-known brands over the more well-known brands.
For some searches, this method of favoring major brands is not so bad.
When users make a simple search for “tomatoes,” for example, a big name brand may show content about “cucumbers” while a small name brand shows content about “tomatoes.” Users will know to click on the small name brand.
But when users make more complex searches – about health or financial issues, for example – they don’t always have the knowledge and expertise to understand which result is better. So they will go with the big name brand.
“You can end up in a place where Google can get content from a few big companies. And that is a sad place to be for the web,” Papadimitriou said. “I think that will be the death of Google at that point, because people will [want] the open web. Real experts, real companies.”
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