shuttle1987
commented
5 years ago A while back there was that narky "let me google that for you" site, I remember clearly StackOverflow explicitly banning this in their moderation guidelines. The links still persisted though since people just thought "if you google it then you'll see what I see and it will solve your problem" and they'd keep posting it. StackOverflow eventually had to take extra technical steps to block any posts that contained the link text by putting a filter in the site posting.
One of the interesting things about this was that the Google search engine results changed over time, and some of the posts that said "just google it" ended up being the first results for people who searched up these posts. But worse than this is that different people who searched from different places wouldn't find the same results. Over time this effect has continued to get more pronounced.
So for example at one point in time I'd hear people say something like "just search up local companies that do XYZ and you'll find us" but if you have localized search results then you won't find these businesses with the same search terms that were suggested since you get different results.
The bigger issues are probably the surveillance capitalism business model that the search result advertising links and rankings use to make profit for Google. If providing different results to different people makes them more money then they try to do that, but this will undermine any example links to searches that we could do. (Interestingly the old query search API is deprecated now, so any old links using that may have broken)
I think there's a few issues, if you link to a Google search for context you have to remember that because of search personalization (filter bubble) your readers could get vastly different results from each other The other thing is adversarial advertisments based on referral link