For decades now, anyone who’s wanted to know everything about anything has asked Google. But is the platform losing its edge – and can we still trust it to tell us the truth?
. When I searched my name, there it was: a picture of my smiling face next to the text “Tom Faber was a physicist and publisher, and he was a university lecturer at Cambridge for 35 years”. Apparently I died on 27 July 2004, aged 77. This was news to me.may create what it calls a “knowledge panel”, a little box with basic information taken from Wikipedia. Somewhere along the way, the algorithm had confused pictures of my face with the biography of another man who shared my name.
It worked. Coupled with Google’s clean, simple interface of a text box and a handful of blue links, the site felt like magic. “Everybody could see then that Google’s results were far better than the others’. That was the basis of everything,” says Dirk Lewandowski, interim professor of data science at the University of Duisburg-Essen, who has studied search engines for 20 years.
Along the way, the company accrued not just economic power, but also social and political power. Rosie Graham, a lecturer in contemporary literature and the digital at the University of Birmingham, says we don’t just ask Google for information, but also for “ways to live our lives”. When we look for answers to social, religious or political questions, Google judges who are the trusted voices, and who we should not hear from.
Has Google search got worse? And if so, what does that look like? Imagine you used to go to your local library and, when you asked for a book, it was produced immediately. Now, when you ask for that same book, the librarian tries to sell you a magazine subscription, waves about some different books they say other people like, then finally produces a big stack of tomes with your desired book wedged awkwardly in the middle. You might have an opinion about this change in service.
On the spammier fringes is what’s known as “black hat” SEO, bad actors who use techniques with fabulously evil names such as “domain squatting”, “reputation abuse”, “obituary spam”, “keyword swarming” or “parasite hosting” to bring their content to the top of Google’s search results and turn a quick buck. Spam pages usually have little meaningful content and are aggressively monetised, hosting intrusive ads to profit from each visitor’s click.
I spoke with representatives of the competing search and answer engines Kagi, DuckDuckGo and Perplexity, all of whom frame this issue as a misalignment in Google’s company incentives. They say Google makes design and business choices to earn revenue for advertisers and shareholders at the cost of search user experience.
Perhaps what is really bothering people is that the internet as a whole feels, in 2024, like a worse place to be. Those who grew up on the web of the late 90s and early 00s might remember openness, community and free thinking. Today, we’re probably more likely to associate the internet with anxiety, loneliness and stress. Maybe we miss the time when the internet felt more human. This may explain why many people searching for information look to Reddit rather than Google.
Asked ‘How many rocks should I eat?’ Google gave this AI Overview: ‘One per day because rocks contain minerals and vitamins’ Yet the biggest concern around AI Overviews came not from users who had cheese sliding off their pizzas, but from writers and publishers online. They’re worried that if Google summarises the information from their websites and delivers it to users, then those users will have no reasons to visit the sites, depriving them of the traffic necessary to fund more content creation.
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