[scbzzzzz]

2 instances I would like to share from my personal experience.

when I am in freshman year, I wanted to host a website and started looking online for best service, I was bombarded with google cloud ads across all websites. I thought google cloud is the best service.(I was never shown results of AWS/IBM watson, when they are far better than Google Cloud at that time). you always use web for exploring options and these ads can manipulate to pivot to one service, when it is not always the best.

after that I tried an experiment with my friends from my collage dorm. we have a proxy for our university. so only tracking I assume is done through respective google accounts.one of them has an Iphone (buys a lot on amazon), others use android. we searched for "best watches to buy", the recommendations/ads(top results) for iphone user is ~1k$(premium brands) and we were shown results of watches around 100$ etc.

I would say above results are manipulative because they will pivot our further searches, the search is not showing best watches/blogs about it. but showing results that the AI think will have higher rate of ads - buy conversion.

The above results definitely will have an impact on further searches, The iphone user will pivot his search to the top results he see which might not always be best.