Lastly, Weinberg argued, users are simply tired of Google’s dominance over their experience of the Internet. The second is Google prioritizing its own services in search results, by, for instance, answering a travel query with Quick Answers pulled from Google Places instead of from a richer, more social source such as Tripadvisor. The first is the company’s practice of tracking user behavior, which drives the kind of creepy, chasing-you-around-the-Internet advertising that Google profits from. of the privacy-focussed search-engine company DuckDuckGo, cited three other sources of dissatisfaction with Google Search. That might be one reason that my toaster results felt so redundant: each site is attempting to solve the same algorithmic equation. Decades of search-engine optimization have resulted in content that is formulated not to inform readers but to rank prominently on Google pages. Links to Web sites have fallen down search-result pages, replaced by Google’s “Quick Answers,” which borrow bits of text from sites so that users don’t even need to click. Yet ads were introduced in 2000 and have proliferated ever since. “The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users,” they wrote as Stanford students, in a 1998 paper. From the beginning, the company’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, recognized the tension between useful search results and profitable ones. The Google Search page today looks largely the same as it did when it first launched, in 1998: blue links against an austere white background. It has made up so much of our online experience for so long that it can be hard to envision anything different. Google Search accounts for around eighty-five per cent of the global search-engine market. “The authentic Web” seemed hidden, Brereton said. Better information could be found on social media, discussion boards, and small-scale personal blogs, but Google Search was deprioritizing those platforms in favor of corporate Web sites, which could afford the money and effort it takes to optimize for Google’s search algorithm. “A lot of the content doesn’t feel authentic-it doesn’t feel real.” He sounded bemused by the runaway popularity of his post, which was part of a personal research project on how information is organized online. “I was browsing the Internet one day, and I began to feel like something was just off,” he said. Clearly, others share Brereton’s sense of search-engine discontentment.īrereton told me recently that his frustration began in late 2020. 12 is a link to an alternative, indie search engine. 11 is a complaint about Google’s search results looking too similar to its ads, while No. 10 most upvoted link ever on the tech-industry discussion board Hacker News. Long live Google + ‘site:’ ”-became the No.

Brereton’s post–which ended “Google is dead. On Reddit’s “Buy It for Life” forum, for instance, they’ll find users showing off a Soviet-era toaster, a restored vintage Sunbeam, and other toasters to “grow old with,” as one put it.

This kind of cluttered onslaught of homogenous e-commerce options is what recently prompted Dmitri Brereton, a twenty-six-year-old engineer at a recruiting-software company in San Francisco, to publish a blog post titled “Google Search Is Dying.” When it comes to product reviews or recipes, Brereton argued, results from Google’s search engine “have gone to shit.” Rather than settling for the default, those who want to know what a “genuine real-life human being” thinks of a certain product have learned work-arounds, such as adding “Reddit” to their searches to bring up relevant threads on that platform. I felt lost among the suggestions, awash in information and yet compelled by none of it. Further down still was a map of toasters that could be purchased in physical proximity to my apartment. (Guilty: I had definitely searched for the Japanese Balmuda’s steam-enabled toasters before.) Lower down on the results page were ads for online retailers such as Amazon and Wayfair, then another carrousel of “Popular Toasters” with user-review metrics, then a list of suggested queries under the heading “People also ask.” (“Is it worth buying an expensive toaster?” “You can’t gain much beyond the $100 models,” an answer pulled from CNET reads.) Swiping down further, I reached aggregated listicles clearly designed to exploit Google’s search algorithm and profit from affiliate marketing: toaster tips from Good Housekeeping, the “4 best toaster ovens of 2022” from Wirecutter. When I recently Googled “best toaster” on my phone, thinking about replacing the appliance in my apartment kitchen, the search immediately yielded a carrousel of images of products from various high-design brands: Balmuda, Hay, Smeg.

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