Searching for a way around Google
The promise of the internet was that it was supposed to give us the world. A couple of decades ago, when you might have first pecked out a search term into Google, the results felt like a revelation — almost like magic. How times have changed.
If you have tried to search for something on Google lately — a hotel or restaurant, or perhaps some medical information — it can sometimes feel like the digital equivalent of wading through sludge.
Results appear less and less helpful, spam is prevalent, and sometimes Google just seems too smart for its own good. And in the seeming decline of Google’s search engine, there is what feels like a broader trend at work — that the modern internet’s reliance on ads and AI is in fact making the experience worse.
It was a trend I was reminded of recently when a blog post titled “Google Search is Dying” generated a lot of chatter this week — so much so that Google’s own public liaison Danny Sullivan felt compelled to respond.
The post’s author, an anonymous writer who goes by @dkb868 on Twitter, asserted that though there were a few reasons that Google search feels so much worse than before, the key factor is that the business model that makes Google search so incredibly lucrative is at odds with an effective product.
Google makes money by presenting ads based on what you search and also the data it has collected about you. That means that when you search for a simple app or a recipe or some information about a medical issue, you’ll be presented first with ads, then with information.
Making matters worse is that because Google is so dominant, whole enterprise have sprung up to react to how people search. Millions of people worldwide search for things related to nutrition and health, so they are thus greeted with an endless array of lowquality websites that may in fact have been cobbled together by AI, not a person.
It’s a sort of vicious cycle — Google endlessly refines search to try and predict what people want, but in response, entire industries work to pollute search results by giving people a cheap, knock-off version of what they want. As pointed out by Michael Sebel, a partner at important venture-capital firm Y Combinator, searching for something like health information or recipes just leads to endless rows of spam.
That dynamic affects more than just Google. Facebook, for example, has expended an enormous amount of time refining its newsfeed so that inflammatory, spammy, or hateful content doesn’t get promoted — but how successful it’s been is still up for debate.
The same issue plagues Twitter, Spotify and more — as automated software determines what we see, what we see becomes more and more shaped by the demands of that software.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Google was part of Web 1.0, in which the internet existed as a big, undifferentiated mass and sites like Google or Yahoo! helped us filter through it.
Web 2.0 was supposed to make everything social so that you could draw on the wisdom of your network as your window onto the world. That didn’t quite happen, and instead we got bad Facebook memes, Twitter fights, and thirst traps on Instagram. The “social era” of the web has had many upsides, but it hasn’t actually made search, shopping, or research any easier.
As the anonymous blog author pointed out, however, what a lot of people are doing to bypass Google’s less-than-stellar results is to append “reddit” to their search — that is, to limit their search to the popular social news site. While Reddit was for many years plagued by bigoted and obscene content, it has since cleaned up its act to sometimes feel like a vibrant source of information that, crucially, comes from people rather than either big institutions or AI bots.
It makes perfect sense. If you want to find out what a laptop is like to own, what is the best way to make coffee at home, or whether someone has had side effects from a medication, hearing from actual people aggregated together on a site is far more effective than wading through Google search results.
This is made all the more true by the fact that Google search results are so often unreliable, there mostly to generate clicks than to inform or help you.
It’s a frustrating situation, but one that also means that even a company as seemingly unflappable as Google may well be ripe for disruption. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing either. At least then, perhaps, we could actually find what we are looking for.
Google search results are so often unreliable, there mostly to generate clicks than to inform or help you