History/Rant
Google has long been the king of Internet Search. It revolutionized how search was done and that made it useable to a mass audience of people that were just starting to get into and understand this digital age that was blossoming into the mass connected society that we are today.
When you really stop to think about it the internet is a mess. An unknowable number of sites, articles and videos that is consistently increasing. Search engines are a there for us to have a way to categorize this mess into a usable format or list. They are necessary, otherwise, we all would need to know exactly how to get to the specific site that we are wanting. Sort of like having a phone book versus having to memorize every number in the phone book.
Although Google was not the first search engine to exist, but it was the best at the time of a “Wild West” internet. (Arguably the internet is still a wild west). This unofficial rank of “Best” is what earned Google’s rapid increase in market share that they hold to today.
Awful Search Results
However, a growing number of people seem to be asking the question of why they cannot find what they were looking for anymore. I am one of those people, Google was a key resource for me in college in finding what I needed, and typically in a search or two I was able to find what I needed. Today though I have to ignore the entire first page of results often and my answer lies somewhere on the third or more page quite often.
Initially I thought this was because of the increasingly complicated nature of my questions. In college when I was just finding out how a network worked my search query might have been something like, “What is DNS”. Now I might use the query of “Transferring cPanel WHM to new server”. (That’s just a recent example I could think of). I eventually found the article I was looking for from cPanel Docs, but I had to go back a few pages first and ignore all the ad links right at the top that eat up half the page. Sometimes I have to spend a few minutes recrafting my search phrase like I am a alchemist who needs the right combo of verbs and consonants to get the golden search result.
My Questioning the “Status Quo”
What tipped me off to the idea of “Its not me it’s you”, is ChatGPT. I was using it as a study resource (article here) and found that I could throw complicated questions at this chat bot, and it gave me great answers, although admittedly I need to verify everything.
Now, I am not saying that a search engine is comparable to a chat bot since one is answering and the other is trying to present potential answers. However what ChatGPT did is demystify the idea in my head that my “complicated” Google searches were hard to understand. Especially when I try to craft those queries with just the “highlights” of what I was looking for in an attempt to make it easier for Google to identify my intentions. Now I wondered what Google was having a hard time with? Ironically, I then listened to a YouTube Video where one of the hosts mentioned the “Silicon Valley Startup” path. In his explanation it is when a company goes in a certain set of stages.
These “Silicon Valley Startup” stages are…
- First, delight your users, which is possible since you aren’t having to get money out of them since funding is coming from investors.
- Second, delight your investors, now you need to consider your profits more to give investors or shareholders something that makes it worthwhile to have or keep investments in your company.
- Third, get rich. Now you turn to how to maximize the profits you yourself get to keep.
For that video he was using it as an example of why he did launch a software product with investing instead opting for a self-sustainable path.
For me that made another thing click into place. Google wasn’t a startup, but maybe this was similar to something happening internally at the company. Something like, increasing profits to make up for other company product’s lacking growth or profits. Or maybe a preparing for a decline in revenue due to economic hardships. Or maybe it is just greed.
An Ex-Googler’s Opinion
There is a podcast that I came across when looking at writing this piece, it covers a previous Google employee’s view on why Google Search seems like it is getting worse. That podcast is “Freakonomics” and Marissa Mayer addresses some questions that were put to her. In response to why search results are not as useful she responds with the fact that the internet has grown so much since Google first was founded. When asked if that is the reason her response was this,
“When you see the quality of your search results go down, it’s natural to blame Google and be like, ‘Why are they worse?’
To me, the more interesting and sophisticated thought is if you say, ‘Wait, but Google’s just a window onto the web. The real question is, why is the web getting worse?’ “
She then explained her opinion on why the web might be getting worse.
“I think because there’s a lot of economic incentive for misinformation, for clicks, for purchases.
There’s a lot more fraud on the web today than there was 20 years ago.
And I think that the web has been able to grow and develop as quickly as it has because of less regulation and because it’s so international.
But we also have to take the flipside of that.
In a relatively unregulated space, there’s going to be, you know, economic mis-incentives that can sometimes degrade quality.
And that does put a lot of onus on the brokers who are searching that information to try and overcome that. And it’s difficult.
It kind of has to be more, in my view, an ecosystem-style reaction, rather than just a simple correction from one actor.”
My Conclusion
Starting off with addressing the last thing I mentioned above. Namely, Marissa Mayer’s comments on the idea that Google can’t be blamed since it is just a window, but instead it is the internet getting worse, and that is because of it not being regulated.
First, lets talk regulation. I would argue that the internet is regulated more now then ever. So for me that doesn’t track well with the same timeline that Google results are getting worse. Also, I would argue that to some extent the internet should not be regulated to strictly as it is the digital plane of existence that is mirroring our physical plane. Obviously with that idea stated, I don’t mean the internet should be wholly unregulated but that a mirroring of the freedoms of speech that we have should be present and not suppressed. We could argue the exact place that the line in the sand should be drawn, but I am just stating that to counteract her idea of regulation.
Second, the idea that the internet is getting worse, and Google is not to blame. I whole heartedly agree with the first statement. The internet to me, seems to be trending into sensationalism just as social media has. At the same time, it seems to be growing slightly more repetitive and therefore redundant depending on what corner of it you happen to be visiting. I think that I need only present the idea of “Top Ten Lists” and everyone reading this will have encountered them at some point in abundance on your travels. It is not that these lists are bad, but I must question why there are so many of them everywhere.
This question leads me into my next point, that Google is at least partially to blame for how the landscape of the internet is shaped today for better or worse. They have roughly an 84% market share on search. An analogy that ties in nicely with Mayer’s concept of Google just being a window to the internet is this. That if I look out my window (Google) into a crowd of people (the internet) and instead of it being clear glass, it has a thick layer of dirt over it with only specific clean spots, then I can only see specific people. Now imagine if those people I can see are each given $20 every minute. Suddenly the crowd would be rushing to stand next to those people. When I finally clean my window, I don’t have a crowd spread evenly anymore, but instead clumps of people in groups at specific points.
With this concept I now have used my “Window” to affect the “Crowd”. So I guess the last question is then, what is the dirt in the above analogy? In my opinion, it is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). People’s digital content that they could make money on live and die by their SEO ranking and SEO itself has created a huge market around it. Google has caused this, be it inadvertent or not. I don’t express opinion on if this is good or bad, just I hate the spreading of the idea that Google is an inadvertent bystander to what is happening. They are the cause either however.
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Regardless, I personally believe now that Google is offering more search ads to increase the potentiality that one gets clicked since they are on a pay-per-click system with advertisers. Also, I hesitate to include this portion, but it seems to me that certain searches are just taking what you enter as a suggestion and instead pushing you toward what Google thinks you should see related to the search. Essentially, I believe that Google seems to weight ad-supported and YouTube results more than real relevant results.
For me, I don’t make any solid predictions over what will happen in the future except one. That prediction is that the general population’s habits, typically trails the tech industry population’s habits. So if technical people as a whole begin to stop using Google for search then although it might take years, a decent chunk of the population will follow them.