Google Search is Dead

Image: Badly edited by author

I realized the other that I’ve almost stopped using Google Search, and that makes me kinda sad.

It’s possible that I’ve forgotten to take off my rose-tinted glasses again — yes, sometimes there is positivity here at Trend Mill! — but there’s something about Google, circa the early 2000s to mid-2010s, that takes me back to the golden days of the Internet. A time when Google Search was a portal to the web, serving up link after link of websites that were actually useful, interesting and diverse, both in content and in visual style/design. If you’re old enough to have read people’s random blog sites, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Anything and everything went, and it was a fascinating window into culture, opinion and more. Google had a similar vibe to Wikipedia in that you could type in a question or thought and then go down a rabbit hole of wonderful if often wacky, websites.

Unfortunately, we know how the story goes after that. Sure, everything got better in terms of the underlying technology, but at the same time, everything got worse in terms of user experience.

Google, like all of Big Tech, had entered its Shareholder Worship era, also known as the Monetize Everything era or the Bleed Everything Dry to Keep That Chart Going Up era.

And in pursuit of pleasing its shareholders, Google leaned all in on advertising…