Google search has become a lot worse than you think look at this let's say how to secure my data okay so 1 2 3 four four adverts these are all sponsored links like imagine if you clicked on one of our YouTube videos and I chose to start with four sponsored ads before I even got into the content Google used to be magic it's easy to take for granted nowadays but the ability to just find anything you wanted in like 5 Seconds was revolutionary when it was new but I've been noticing more and more over the last few years things starting to feel a little off so I've done a deep dive no thanks to Google and I found the three major reasons as to why Google search is not just in Decline but it's borderline broken now and the way that they started changing this results page is the first like look at this again do you notice something cuz aside from the fact that four ads before your content feels almost violating the thing that's even worse is when you consider something called the fold the imagined line where if you want to see anything past it you have to take action like scrolling down the term comes from newspapers where you'd want to put the most important information not just on the front page but specifically on the top half of that front page so that people can see it even when the paper is folded up in Stacks above the fold now newspapers never got to a stage of having so much power that they could regularly afford to stick big adverts across their fold they needed the fold to convince people to get the paper in the first place but compare that to now where the entire fold is just sponsored content and it's starting to feel like like Google's gotten too comfortable Google has become so at ease that they don't even feel like they need to convince people to use them anymore this company used to Pride specifically on how quickly their search engine finds you an accurate answer but now you're either having to specifically invest more time just to scroll past their ads or trust that the ads have what you want spoiler they do not otherwise those posts would be at the top organically without having to pay to get there oh and you might have forgotten but a decade ago these sponsored links used to be highlighted in yellow indicating to the user in a very obvious way that these aren't organic search results so that you could just filter them out and sometimes they were in their own corded off section to the right of the results not anymore now the sponsored search results look exactly like the genuine search results apart from a tiny little much less obvious sponsored text and all of that is just for when you're searching for answers look what happens when you start searching for products so I've been doing a lot of searching recently for a new chair wow uh yet again not a single organic result Insight but instead an entire Carousel of shopping ads and I think there's something particularly interesting happening with these shopping ads and I'm not even talking about the fact that no it's not just you these product listings are taking up more real estate on the results page nowadays than they used to they are 34% bigger just compared to 2021 but it's not even that see I do a lot more internet shopping than most people for one video sometimes we're buying 20 products and so while this one is more of a feeling and it's a little harder to prove it is really starting to feel like with shopping Google is specifically making the organic search results bad to make the best way to shop directly from the ads like whenever I'm searching for something specific like let's say I was trying to find the thinnest mini fridge to fit a particular space in my room thinnest mini fridge and would you look at that something that completely fits the description I've typed a fridge that's not too big and it's thin so the sponsored results are spot on Google clearly understands what I'm looking for so what happens when I scroll down and look at the organic results okay first up is Amazon and nope nope nope nope uh none of these products okay so let's go back to Google search and just scroll down nope that's not it that's not it that's not it nothing here is it every one of these fridges is short and wide which is not what I was looking for this is puzzling right like surely Google with its current level of intelligence and review data has the ability to take me straight to the single best rated product for exactly what I'm looking for and yet does it not seem a little like Google's playing Dum the difference between how Tac sharp they are with making sure that the sponsored recommendations are spot on but then at the very least not putting that same effort into their organic results but maybe even deliberately making them less accurate and when you look at the company's business model it would make sense as to why they might do that cuz here's the thing Google doesn't make more money if you find the perfect product it's not like they're out there hoping you'll have an awesome Google Experience and you'll go recommend Google to five friends no Google has your attention and they're making more money now by making more from your attention Google's dream situation is that every company realizes that if they want to sell they have to pay Google to be part of the sponsored buying section and I can't shake the feeling that they are trying to create this pay to- win environment because the sponsored shopping segment is now not just a way to get a little bit of a visibility boost it's been designed to be the only easy way for users to shop on Google like for example let's see what happens when you try and search for something with a little bit more detail so let's go back to chairs but this time world's most comfortable chair as expected the shopping Carousel is filled with exactly the kinds of things I'm looking for a varied selection of all very comfortable things with links to buy them but then scroll down and most of the search results are just articles list based articles which is a separate very big problem that I'm getting to so I nearly thought for a second oh this is a good result that looks like a very comfortable chair for £ 75 and then you scroll down and you see this item is available for adoption not for sale so I pay just for the chair to continue to exist like what the Google doesn't even seem to care if it takes you to scam sites so many times when I've been browsing for what furniture might go into our future home we are recommended sites like litfad in this sponsored Carousel okay so litfad reviews trust Pilots at the very top and warning this company's trust score is currently unavailable due to a breach of trust Pilots guidelines this company has been pressuring people to change or remove their negative reviews and even then it's primarily one star okay so litfad is a scam beware of lit Fat's customer service it doesn't take Sherlock Homes to see that this is a scam company I don't see any way that Google wouldn't know that there are companies like this that they are actively promoting and so the only conclusion that I can draw from this is that either Google is completely overwhelmed or Google doesn't care if someone on Google is watching this then correct me if I'm wrong I would love to be corrected or at the very least promise that you're working to fix this but it sure looks like right now as long as a company pays it doesn't actually matter whether they're a scam or not they go right to the top I can't tell you how many times I've accidentally ended up on chatbot app or better gbt when I've been trying to search for chat gbt because they look basically the same and they just paying to be ranked higher than chat GPT these companies their entire business model is basically people accidentally clicking on them it didn't always work like this Google when they started out did not use to make a lot of money and that was on purpose you know there was a time when Google would receive actual fan mail with checks and cash inside from people saying we love your product and you deserve to be making more money than you are and that's because of the founders who in their original paper presenting Google to the world specifically said advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm and yet here we are in Q2 2024 Google made $ 847 billion in revenue 76. 3% of which came from ads and about 75% of that ad revenue is specifically from Google search ads alone as opposed to YouTube ads Etc and then even for Searchers where there's no product to sell you and there's no company paying to sponsor it what does Google do try to push their own services and their own in initiatives like how many people are there on Earth 7951 billion H now don't get me wrong if I'm looking for a quick answer to a simple question I appreciate how Google just goes here you go but in 2024 this is not the right answer it's actually not close to the right answer we have 8. 2 billion people and if you click into it you can see that it's showing us the answer provided by Google initiatives even if the answer is way more outdated than other company source is on the internet but okay you probably catch my drift by this point Google search results page is starting to look an awful lot like a an old 2000's web portal which is ironic because one of the biggest reasons that Google actually beat Yahoo to become the world's deao e library was because they specifically didn't try to be one well Yahoo did because they knew they'd make more money if they kept people on their own Pages as much as possible but it's at this stage into my deep dive that I came to my second realization that while Google has fallen from Grace changed who they are and started to put the users experience second it's not all Google's fault a lot of what's been making it so hard to find the right web page these days is also down to the people making them if you work online in any capacity really or you know you just have really boring friends you'll have heard of search engine optimization or seo seo has become a massive industry with a market size valued at 1.
8 billion in 2022 projected to reach 7. 1 billion in 2028 the basic idea is about analyzing the way that Google's algorithm ranks pages and then employing various tricks to make your page look as good as possible to that algorithm so that you get placed higher and therefore clicked more and as the algorithm has changed so have the kind of tricks you see being used like for example you used to be able to boost your visibility just by having lots of reviews associated with your business even if those reviews are negative which led to for instance a scam in which a man named Vitali borker deliberately sent damaged or fake glasses to customers hoping they would be angered enough to review bomb him knowing that it would promote his site but nowadays you'll see these problems instead sites including buzzwords to capture as many possible search queries as you can think of that's why so many AliExpress listings have incomprehensible names that are just a string of largely unrelated words and it's why articles like recipes which should be so simple have to start off with paragraphs of Preamble about how grandma always made the best cozy warm winter Autumn cookies 2024 yeah man relatable people updating old articles even if they do none of the new research but literally just change the title to 2024 this happens all the time in Tech so many times I've been browsing the best X products of 2024 and I'll slowly realize as I scroll through the list that not a single one is from 2024 the website is effectively trying to scam me by recommending old products that make no sense today they'll have erased all mentions of it being written in 2021 or 2022 and as far as Google's rules are concerned if an article has been edited in 2024 it's now a 2024 article companies especially those with lots of ads on their Pages trying everything they can to rank really highly for searches that are totally unrelated to their brand because they know it'll get them lots of clicks and lots of Revenue like why does Forbes have so many articles on supplements well because supplement ads pay a lot of money but here's the kicker the only companies who are pumping out this much content and paying to boost their visibility as much as possible are the ones with a monetary incentive to do so and the way do that is being flooded with affiliate links you can see this very much in action because there are papers showing that only a small percentage of review articles actually use affiliate marketing but the majority of the results that come up on a search do use affiliate marketing and that means it's got to a stage now where searching for the best of basically anything is pointless almost every single article is a top 10 of products not selected based on their Merit but in fact just whether or not they'll get a kickback when you buy them how many times have you reached the number one recommended product in these lists only to find that it's clearly an imported product from China being sold for multiple times what it's worth I can guarantee that a large slice of these articles are written with the writer not actually having bought and tested all 10 products themselves but instead having gone onto Amazon search for the highest rated products ideally expensive ones so they can make more from the affiliate links and spend 1 hour max compiling them into a list before spamming that list with buzzword to try and capture as many people as possible who will actually trust this research so why doesn't Google just fix it well determining the quality of a result is actually really complicated the best that they are able to do right now is to factor in the reaction of the users from a Google Presentation what's crazy is that we don't actually understand documents Beyond some basic stuff we hardly look at documents we look at people if a document gets a positive reaction we figure it is good if the reaction is negative it is probably bad grossly simplified this is the source of Google's Magic so basically what this means is if a page is ranking high and it's getting lots of clicks and those people end up on that page for ages scrolling through the Meer of deliberately vapid text interlaced with ads to find the actual answer they came for then the algorithm figures hey they spent a long time there that must be good and the Vicious Cycle continues and one thing that I find is a really unfortunate side effect of this constant arms race between Google and then these slimy growth at all cost sites is that every time Google updates their algorithm to counter the new strategies it's most of the genuinely good worthwhile sites that don't keep up with the times and just focus on making good content those are the ones who get buried like Mom and Pop Air Purifier review site house fresh. com who actually do test the products unlike the top 10 listic or magazines who don't but now we come to the final frontier because Google success has always been to do with AI but now they are integrating generative large language model AI in ways that are mostly making things even worse you've probably noticed an increasing number of these AI overviews when you're searching for things coming up and you probably also noticed they're not very accurate they often serve you the kind of flagrantly wrong gobbley yuk best described with the expression go enough coined by marketing executive and search expert AJ con whose research was super helpful for this video but here's the thing let's assume that these AI popups work perfectly 100% of the time which is obviously the goal that Google's striving towards how does that help all the sites that have helped to First gather that info the sites who've done the work research and Publishing the content that it seems like Google is using to train their AI answer it doesn't as a matter of fact it actually seems an awful lot like Google is trying to replace those sites and on one hand you could argue that you know AI summaries are amazing and they're going to make the search experience even faster but after doing all of this digging I'm starting to feel a slightly different way what's to stop Google from deciding to use its AI to eventually replace the need to visit any other website so you spend your entire browsing session within Google search page itself and then the only way to get ahead of the AI pay for it that way the entire time you use Google you're paying Google in some way or another maybe that's not the world that Google wants to build but it's hard to argue that they're not moving closer towards it and this actually reminds us of something an idea coined by Cory drro called in ification which I talk about fully in this video here and it's effectively where online services start off by enticing users with a high quality product when the users are locked in they make it worse for them to better ser their business customers and then finally once both sides are locked in they start shating all of them to maximize profits for themselves by which point oops we don't have a desirable product anymore and I think it's fair to say Google is taking some big swings into that final stage here and it's going to sting their business customers even more than usual considering that the very mechanism that they're using to make things harder for them this AI that they're now having to compete against only works by stealing their content anyway now if you do want the web experience before or this ification back then I recommend you install surf shark VPN for a few reasons it cleans up your browsing cookies popups trackers it's got a baked in antivirus with a ton of features like webcam protection which blocks unauthorized apps from getting access to your camera but here's what I think is the coolest so at this point you probably know how most vpns work they take your traffic they root it through one of their servers so that all the website on the other end can see is the details of that server and that's already pretty good but surf shock uses Nexus technology meaning that every one of their servers is connected and that surf Shar can bounce you between all of them on the fly without dropping your connection and that's pretty Next Level because it means your even more difficult to track you can have a new IP address every time you click a new link and instead of your data being masked through one server your data can be masked through an entire network of servers and you will get even better speeds because as soon as a faster server option opens up you will be rooted through that instead of the one you on automatically and that's just part of why I use surf sharkk drish uses surf shark our entire team uses surf shark it is the only vpm that I recommend to people and if you go to Surf shark.
