You may have noticed that Google Search is unusable as of late. Searching for something as simple as chairs results in a page full of sponsored content and ads, often from untrustworthy websites. Google search has degraded so much that a popular search method is to append the word “reddit” to the end of a search to get useful information.
Google started as an eigenvector problem and way to crawl and index the web efficiently. The search engines of that time used the number of times a keyword appeared on a webpage to rank importance. You can imagine how easily this simple indexing system could be exploited by bad actors. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, PhD students at Stanford University, came up with a novel solution for efficient searching that assigned a rank to each page in the index. This rank was calculated using backlinks and forward links and holds its basis in the concept of eigenvector centrality, which defines the importance of a node in a network from the graph’s adjacency matrix.
Google search became everyone’s preferred search engine because of how efficient the PageRank algorithm, as described above, was at returning optimal search results. By bringing far more characteristics of a webpage into consideration when determining its place on the search results hierarchy, Google had made the expansive catalog of the web usable. The founders of Google were adamant about not including paid results on the main search page because they felt that an advertiser dictated web would come at detriment to users. That is, until recently.
Google makes money from advertising, not searches. Some of you may remember how advertisement results used to be colorfully marked on Google search to indicate that they were not organic. As of 2020, Google has rolled back this feature and advertisements are marked only by a small “sponsored” label next to the link. The integration of the shop tab into the results page takes up the entirety of visible screen space. Below the shop feature, sponsored results take importance over organic results, throttling web traffic to sites which have paid to appear at the top of search results. Moreover, the implementation of Google’s AI Overview feature stifles further exploration by offering an easy to read explanation for search queries.
Google’s downfall should not come as a surprise. It is yet another link in the chain of “enshittification”, a phenomenon that seems to have taken over all kinds of web services. The term was coined by Cory Doctorow of the Financial Times and refers to the systemic degradation of online platforms. From Facebook purposefully serving up inflammatory posts to increase user engagement to Spotify making their UI annoyingly difficult to use, it seems that companies just want to squeeze every bit of profit out of their customers, at the cost of useability. Per Cory, this is in part caused by the massive monopolies held by tech giants on the online market. It’s hard to leave Facebook for a less invasive social networking site when all your friends are on there. However, the tables may turn for Google. Users are tired of inefficient search results, and better search engines are on the rise. The fate of Google depends on whether it can revert its priorities back to the algorithm that made it the gold standard for web surfing.
