Don’t Google It
The company is in danger of becoming the spam it has spent 20 years trying to fight
In a recent post, I Kinda Hate The Internet Now, I lamented the destruction of Google search. What was “once glorious feature that allowed us to find almost any information, video or image we could think up with the typing of a few words,” has, like the rest of the internet experience, been destroyed by a gradual decay.
First came SEO gurus and growth hacking. Then came ads, target results and sponsored positions. Then Google itself started playing dirty tricks and manipulating search results, and its monopolistic powers over what is seen and what isn’t have resulted in lower-quality search results. Before we knew it, search results couldn’t be trusted. These days, you have to scroll an entire page to find the first result that wasn’t sponsored, gamed or put there by Google itself. The fundamental concept that something at the top of search results was the best option — something that made Google so well-used that it coined the term “just Google it” — has been dismantled.
It sucks. It sucks so bad that people think asking an AI chatbot questions (which just pulls info from the same website anyways) is a better alternative. That leads nicely to some recent developments that perfectly sum up the sorry state of affairs surrounding…
