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 1,60,000, according to The Guardian.
A Google spokesperson told The Conversation the experiment did not 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…