Without us even realizing it, the internet's most-used website has been getting worse. On too many queries, Google is more interested in making search lucrative than a better product for us.
The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine stored some Google search results over the years. When we look back, a picture emerges of how Google increasingly fails us. There's more space dedicated to ads that look like search results. More results start with answer"snippets" - sometimes incorrect - ripped from other sites. And increasingly, results point you back to Google's own properties such as Maps and YouTube, where it can show more ads and gather more of your data.
We all know Google has ads. But back when Google first won us over, it had fewer ads, and they were generally marked with a colorful background. Today, my T-shirts result is buried under four ads, as well as nine shopping ad results over on the right side. There's also a giant map with links - we'll talk about the proliferation of this kind of stuff in a moment.
It's true that back in 2000, Google's actual search results for T-shirts weren't as good - CDNow and even Apple were among the sites that made it to the top five. But remember: Shopping-related searches were less common in 2000. And that doesn't excuse Google making it so hard to get to its actual results today.
Believe it or not, Google also thinks we don't mind the ads - and that they're actually useful. Said Levin:"We have an incentive to only show ads when it's valuable to people." She didn't answer when I asked what percent of queries now have ads, and what percent of the search results they take up. Sometimes when you search, you do just want an answer - especially when you're using a smart speaker. But who died and made Google the ultimate arbiter of knowledge? Google doesn't always snip correctly, like with Question One."The information was accurate and came from an official website, but the snippeted portion of the page only represented one side of a civic topic, so we took action under our relevant policy to remove that snippet," said Levin.
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