Search Engines are Local Shopping Portals

I wanted to do some research on Tritamyl flour, a grain used by Odlums for their gluten free flour as of a few years ago. This is an Irish company with little reach beyond Ireland and Great Brittan, so I expected to see reviews from either of the countries they supply. Instead I get American naval-gazers who haven’t ever seen or tried the stuff pontificating on web forums about how they would never touch a thing they don’t understand.

Needless to say, my search was futile.

And the problem is that search has been optimized for local shopping. The engines are not built to anticipate someone actually wanting input from someone else who lives in another country and is being sold to by different companies. Search is a servant to ads, ads only make sense when they can drive revenue, I can follow this short causal chain of evidence.

Is any ad-driven web technology doomed to become an isolating, ad-driven enterprise? No wonder people only see opinions like their own when then roam the web, all of the services have been tuned to sell to a niche that they are in, thereby bypassing the wealth of opportunity hidden in the great diversity of people each site serves.

Facebook has users from 213 countries. Why am I always talking with people from (primarily) one? Google supports 104 languages, but how weird would it feel to see a result not in English? There is a spectrum between experiences that expand your views and those that contract them, and perhaps the pendulum needs to move back towards the broadening end once more.