Saturday, June 3, 2017

When a search giant abandons your country

Google "sri lanka news"
I am not sure what is going wrong. Is my country, Sri Lanka, just cricket, or is it something wrong with Google? When the entire country is suffering due to floods and land slides leaving up to 1/20 of the country's population affected, Google search on "Sri Lanka news" just returns news on Sri Lanka cricket.

I am not sure whether this is done systematically through some hidden involvement. It annoys me a lot. Are we really addicted to Cricket that much? Seriously? We have bigger problems and more important news at the moment. How can I trust the Internet, when the most popular search engine returns irrelevant news?

Please note that I used the private mode. So my results are not affected by my past views. So you cannot give the excuse that my search results are based on my previous clicks. If I want to read about Sri Lanka in cricket, I would search for "sri lanka cricket" instead. When I search for news, I want real news. Not stories of a certain sports or gossips about actors. This is not a one-time event. I tested Google several times for Sri Lanka news over the past years. It always disappointed me with cricket news. News is something that affects the people. At least they are the news that should pop up as the top stories. Google fails Sri Lanka miserably here.

On the other hand, duckduckgo, a newer search engine performs better, returning more relevant real news on Sri Lanka for the same search. Probably we all should switch to duckduckgo as our search engine.
duckduckgo "sri lanka news"


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