The decay and fall of Google for search

Note: This is satire

Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using Google as a way to search the web in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more self-serving platform, and if you’re doing a lot of searching then you’re hanging out with really bad company.

Back in the day, Google used to be a respectable thing, much like getting a coveted, trusted expert to find the answers to your queries. It’s not that way any more.

Here’s an example of a search results page that I recently received:

image via seobook.com

If you ignore the bad spacing and read the parts that I bolded, Google offered me a spam results page full of Google-owned properties. That’s a clear violation of Google’s quality guidelines. Moreover, we’ve been seeing more and more reports of “SERP crowding” that are really “GOOG hitting the quarterly numbers” or worse, “we’ll milk every dime out of you until we control the entire online ecosystem.”

Ultimately, this is why we can’t have nice things in the search space: a new company starts out as “Don’t be evil.” Then more and more changes pile on until only the barest trace of legitimate search results remain. We’ve reached the point in the downward spiral where people are creating “private search engines” and writing articles about “Google taking over the world.”

So stick a fork in it: Google is done; it’s just gotten too spammy. In general I wouldn’t recommend doing a Google search query unless you are willing to vouch for their shady advertising practices or know Matt Cutts personally. I wouldn’t recommend relying on Google, Google+, YouTube or Blogspot as a strategy for finding information online.

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