LITTLE LIES THE INTERNET TOLD ME
By TIM WU
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.”
These practices seem to run afoul of Federal Trade Commission policies. …
Keep reading The Many Deceptions at the Heart of the Internet : The New Yorker.
