Google used to be the powerhouse of the internet. Now it’s just useless garbage.
I remember the early days of Google, when they were just a humble little search engine with big ambitions. They indexed the internet, and virtually anything one wanted could be found almost right away with the right combination of keywords. They weren’t the only game in town, but they were better than their main competitors Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves. Google was a simple search engine with no frills, no agenda, and no bullshit.
So what the hell happened?
Over the last ten years, I’ve watched Google slowly become an unusable heaping steaming pile of shit. It started with people taking advantage of SEO to boost their half-assed content farms to the top of results, but now it’s descended into outright trash, with Google seemingly going out of their way to reward this behavior.
Granted, people gaming the system has always been a thing (in the early days it was called “Google bombing”), and people would do things like make President George W. Bush come up as the first result for a search on “miserable failure”, or Albino Black Sheep’s famous “Did you mean ‘French military defeats‘?” page that came up whenever you searched “French military victories”. Eventually Google caught on to the tricks and fixed the loophole, putting an end to Google bombing. It became a perpetual game of cat and mouse between Google and people gaming the system, with Google continually striving to maintain neutrality in their results and not allow any kind of bias to leak in. In fact, Google’s company motto was “Don’t be evil”.
They’ve since abandoned that motto for their current one, “Do the right thing.” The “right thing” of course being kowtowing to the demands of advertisers and the obnoxiously loud crybabies on social media who never seem to run out of things to be offended over. Google’s idea of doing “the right thing” seems to involve manipulating results to promote a left-leaning narrative.
Google and its defenders will swear up and down that the search engine has no bias, that there’s no political agenda, that they aren’t promoting a narrative using their algorithms. This is simply untrue, from what I’ve seen Google has a very clear liberal bias, particularly when it comes to news and sensitive subjects. Google’s supporters will do every kind of mental gymnastics possible to defend it, even going as far as to say stuff like “Well that just means the truth has a liberal bias!” Are you shitting me? “The truth has a liberal bias”. No it doesn’t, you fucking retard. Truth literally has no bias.
Another defense of this behavior that gets thrown around all the time is that Google has an obligation to fight things like hate speech, intolerance, and fake news. The argument is that, by showing results that include these things, Google is promoting those ideologies. This argument is fucking stupid, because Google’s job is to index the internet and make it searchable, not dictate right and wrong to us by gatekeeping search results. Labels like “hate speech” and “fake news” are routinely abused and distorted to fit anything that contradicts mainstream narrative, giving a large company the power to restrict access to information based on such flimsy criteria is more dangerous than actual hate speech and fake news. Any time someone tells me there’s an obligation to take away access to information for some greater good I’m immediately reminded of countries like China or the Soviet Union. Restricting access to “harmful” information is a hallmark of dictatorships. We give China and North Korea shit for doing this yet we do it too. But I guess it’s okay if it’s something that the media says is bad for us, right?
Over the last few years, it seems like Google has not only given up on combatting SEO abuse and bias, but they’ve made it their business model. Search results prioritize political bias and advertisers to the point where Google will outright modify or remove terms from your search in order to give you results that fit a set narrative or promote their advertisers.
This should be no surprise to anyone. After all, advertising accounts for over 75% of Google’s revenue, and in the 4th financial quarter of 2023 they made $48 billion on it. Prioritizing profit over neutrality appears to be the “right thing” according to Google. And you know what, that’s fine, because the point of a company is to make money. Google isn’t running a charity service, they’ve got bills to pay and shareholders to appease just like any other company. And sometimes those shareholders also hold shares in other large companies, and those large companies could benefit greatly from Google prioritizing them in search results.
Except, Google is in the unique position where their main service is to provide people with access to information. And not only that, but they’re the top provider of this service, to the point where people call searching “Googling”. As such, shouldn’t there at least be some obligation of neutrality? Google literally controls the average person’s access to information. Private company or not, why should they be allowed to suppress that information?
Even apolitical searches suffer from a similar issue, with those results often favoring autogenerated crap websites and advertisers, even if they have to modify your search terms to make it happen. I want nothing more than to find the owners of sites like FixYa and Just Answer and fix their crotches with a pair of steel-toed boots. These sites never actually offer any real help, most of their content is either written by AI or people from India who give long convoluted answers that do everything short of actually answer the question asked. And yet, time after time Google feels the need to include these sites in searches.
Same with Quora. Quora is like if someone saw Yahoo Answers and said “Cool concept, but how can we make it even dumber and more useless?”, and someone else replied “Have the answers come from people in India.” I have never once found what I’m looking for on Quora, and I’m 100% sure that nobody else has either. For some reason though (money), Google feels the need to boost Quora to the top of most searches. Google can change the UI every day to celebrate some bullshit obscure person or event but they can’t implement a feature that lets me hide results from certain websites?
It’s gotten so bad that people have taken to adding “Reddit” to their searches to actually find what they’re looking for. When we’re relying on Reddit for answers then you know things are bad. Google’s algorithm has taken note of this, and now Reddit posts are usually found closer to the top for most searches even without adding “Reddit” to the search. Google has pretty much said “Fuck it, go ask Reddit instead”. What the hell Google? You’re a search engine, it’s your primary function to provide users with relevant information. Don’t outsource your job to social media.
But it gets even better.
Content farms have also caught onto this trick, and have begun adding “Reddit” to their own sites to capitalize on the trend. This is usually done in tandem with changing the publication dates on older articles so they rank higher. Does Google do anything to punish this scummy practice that’s clearly gaming the system? Of course not, because that would take away important ad revenue. Get fucked, users!
At this point, Google has such an absurdly large monopoly that I honestly don’t know what could be done to stop them. I’ve taken to using other search engines like DuckDuckGo or Yandex, because their results are closer to what Google used to be in terms of accuracy and relevance. Unfortunately, I’m still heavily entrenched in their other services like Gmail, so I can’t really cut the Google tether entirely. The only thing I can suggest to anyone who wants to try to fight this behemoth is to just find a different search engine and use that instead. Aside from DuckDuckGo and Yandex, there’s also Mojeek, Ecosia, and many others. Just using a different search engine will whittle away at Google’s precious ad revenue. It’s not the best strategy, but it’s certainly more effective than continuing to feed the beast.
If you want unbiased results, use basically anything except Google (or Bing). If you want to be told what to think and how to think it, then Google is the search engine for you.
R.A.N.T.E.R.