The Tragedy of Google Search - The Atlantic

[rcjordan]

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/google-search-size-usefulness-decline/675409/

[Brad]

The article brings up some good points.

1. Can one general web search engine keep up with the web?

2. Will general web search have to split into many general web search engines?

3. Will general search engines need to also specialize by language or geography or other things like privacy? (Just like medicine has become too complex for a general practitioner doctor to be able to cover everything.)

4. We are seeing a lot of early experimentation in search engines that are trying to index the non-commercial web, will that be another split or specialization: non-commercial vs. commercial web?

Added:

5. Oh oh, and how many ways can we repackage Bing?  hhh

[Brad]

Related

https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/

[ergophobe]

>> Related

" When they want you to buy something
they will call you."
  — Wendell Berry, 1971

That explains one of my long-standing complaints. It is often very hard to find a manufacturers website if that website does not support commerce. Instead you get a cesspool of retail as if someone had magically appended "buy" to your query.

Google is the first great knowledge project in the history of the world that was a "free with ads" model.

[Adam C]

Related

https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/

Both articles are a great read.  This one particularly piqued my interest - but not sure I agree with the wholly negative sentiment...

This onscreen Google slide had to do with a "semantic matching" overhaul to its SERP algorithm. When you enter a query, you might expect a search engine to incorporate synonyms into the algorithm as well as text phrase pairings in natural language processing. But this overhaul went further, actually altering queries to generate more commercial results.

There have long been suspicions that the search giant manipulates ad prices, and now it's clear that Google treats consumers with the same disdain. The "10 blue links," or organic results, which Google has always claimed to be sacrosanct, are just another vector for Google greediness, camouflaged in the company's kindergarten colors.

Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here's how it works. Say you search for "children's clothing." Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for "NIKOLAI-brand kidswear," making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren't searching for at all. It's not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don't get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can't escape.

Why would Google want to do this? First, the generated results to the latter query are more likely to be shopping-oriented, triggering your subsequent behavior much like the candy display at a grocery store's checkout. Second, that latter query will automatically generate the keyword ads placed on the search engine results page by stores like TJ Maxx, which pay Google every time you click on them. In short, it's a guaranteed way to line Google's pockets.

It's also a guaranteed way to harm everyone except Google. This system reduces search engine quality for users and drives up advertiser expenses.

As an SEO for commercial content, this sounds ideal.  Google blending the SERPs to give commercial content exposure where it may not have otherwise received it!  Thank you Google.

And its been pretty clear for sometime that Google is blending the 10 blue links with a variety of alternative perspectives on a query.  Was it Hummingbird that brought this to scale?  I don't recall.

[ergophobe]

>> As an SEO for commercial content

It's certainly true that, for retailers and SEOs, a much worse turn of events would have been if they had tweaked the algorithm in the other direction, that is to map specific commercial searches to more generic non-commercial searches. That would have forced everyone to pay for ads while mostly bidding on the same broad match  generic searches. But of course that would have destroyed the ad ecosystem so they would never have done that.

At a certain point, though, if you lose your user base, you become useless to retailers. Most typical users felt that Google's advanced linguistic transformations, if they had any idea at all about how google works, were intended to surface the best results even if they seemed maddeningly bad at doing so and it seemed strangely difficult to hone your query to get non-commercial results in many cases. Now we know that search quality was never the point of these transformations. They are not bad at the thing they are trying to do, they are trying to do something completely different from what they say they are trying to do, and they turn out to be quite good at that.

Google was once a company that gave people warm feelings. It was once fun. Whimsical ("I'm feeling lucky").

Now it is more like 1990s Microsoft (back when it was most often abbreviated as M$). Or 1970s AT&T. It's the giant company you don't like but can't avoid.

Altering generic non-commercial queries to morph them into specific commercial queries results in a disconnect between the promise and the product.

We were promised the world's greatest library, but we got the world's biggest shopping mall. Thankfully the mall has a decent bookstore and a good info booth. Unfortunately, the kind elderly gentleman at the info booth is getting kickbacks from the largest retailer in the mall to send you there no matter what you're actually looking for.