Google Is Not Getting Worse, People Are Just Getting Lazier

I was thinking of writing this post for a long time. But I don’t know, people should know this stuff. Google is a trillion dollar company. How much money do you think they spend on improving search, one of their core businesses? A lot of money. And Google has spent a lot of time finding all these black hat techniques to game their search results. So much so that one of the common questions people have about SEO techniques is, “Will Google realize what I’m doing and penalize me.” And guess what? Most of the time the answer is ‘yes’. Google is really really smart.

Although I think Google is way too conservative. The main way their algorithm works is domain authority. So Wikipedia is going to rank high. Reddit is going to rank high. Quora is going to rank high. Medium is going to rank high. Reputable news sites are going to rank high. Some random no name blog? Even if it has really good information it’s going to take a long time to rank. If you follow the SEO community what they say is it can take over a year for good content to reach a high position in the search results.

So it’s not the most friendly to people trying to get ranked. But it is good for searchers because they can find very high quality information. It takes a while for the good stuff to bubble up but it does eventually.

But everywhere I look people are like, “Google is worse now.” I don’t think so, I think Google is better now than it has ever been. I think the reason why we think Google is getting worse is because we’re using it more to search for more obscure stuff.

And who is writing about this obscure stuff? People trying to make money. If you can make a blog that has very high quality content on it you can make a lot of money. So when I see comments like this:

SEO is done by producing good content? Then why is every search result a mind numbing clickbait these days…?

Well, I don’t know what you’re searching but for most queries the result I’m looking for is usually number one or two. You’re only going to get ‘mind numbing clickbait’ results if you search for obscure things because there are so few results Google can pick from.

And Google has gotten better at this too. Have you seen Google search snippets?

This solves the problem of having to scroll down to find stuff and it’s probably one of the more significant additions to Google search in recent memory.

And this is not the only person who says that Google is getting worse. There are a lot of people saying this. It seems to be a popular topic. Just like enshittification. Oh, no, everything is getting worse! Cry me a river.

Internet companies just have much lower barriers to entry. If one company can survive so too can a hundred others. So predatory pricing is considerably less effective.

If you think the internet is so bad quit your bitching and build your own app. That’s what I did.

You know, The Verge recently ran a post titled ‘The people who ruined the internet’ on SEO. And you know those articles that contradict themselves half way through the article? It’s really funny, right? It’s because the author knows they’re wrong but doesn’t want to change the post title because they want the clicks. And no one reads that far anyways. Especially long form articles like this one. Well this is one of those articles.

And most of all, Sullivan is pissed that people think Google results have gone downhill. Because they haven’t, he insisted. If anything, search results have gotten a lot better over time. Anyone who thought search quality was worse needed to take a hard look in the mirror.

“We have an entire generation that grew up expecting the search box to do the work for them,” he said. “We might do a better job of matching for a bulk of people, but for people who are super sensitive, when they have that fail moment, now it becomes, ‘All my searches aren’t good.’”

The problem was not Google. The problem was not SEOs. The problem was kids these days.

Of course Sullivan would say this, though. He works for Google. I felt like I began to understand why many SEOs had told me that Cutts’ departure had marked a major turning point in the history of the internet, emblematic of Google’s transition from idealistic startup to one of the most valuable and powerful companies to ever exist. Over the phone, Cutts came off as humble and thoughtful, acknowledging the nuances and challenges of the search engine business, while Sullivan sounded like an impatient corporate stooge, trying to gaslight me into believing the sky was red.

But here’s the part where I started to feel the way I’ve felt so often in recent years, like I was losing my grip on reality: Sullivan was not the only person who tried to tell me that search results have improved significantly. Out of the dozen-plus SEOs that I spoke with at length, nearly every single one insisted that search results are way better than they used to be. And except for Sullivan, these were not people with an incentive to praise Google. If anything, these were folks who lamented how much harder it had become for them to take advantage of Google. Today, they told me, search results are just objectively more accurate. More useful. More difficult to manipulate.

This was not what I had been noticing, and this was certainly not what I had been hearing from friends and journalists and friends who are journalists. Were all of us wrong? Or engulfed in some kind of Baader–Meinhof frequency bias delusion? Had I been researching a nonexistent problem? Were Google results actually amazing? Truly, I had lost the plot. Was the premise of this piece completely off? Was I the asshole who deserved to be attacked by an alligator?

But then the author decides to listen to one SEO ‘expert’, Lily Ray, and her random story about E-E-A-T without explaining why it’s such a problem.

Ray seemed like the most reasonable person I had spoken to so far. Sure, she called herself a “thought leader,” and yes, sure, she had changed her last name to improve her personal branding by more closely associating herself with her grandmother’s uncle, the artist Man Ray. Maybe some people would say that’s the kind of absurd behavior that merits being attacked by an alligator, but I was beginning to come down on the side of the SEOs, who seemed to have a lot less agency than I’d first imagined.

Now I don’t want to be too negative but… there are just so many red flags in that paragraph.

E-E-A-T is not the problem. Because Google does a ton of testing to make sure every change to the algorithm is an improvement. They have tons of documentation on what makes a good search result and they spend a lot of time on it. If E-E-A-T made searching worse they’d know.

Now I know what you’re thinking, what about AI spam? And, yeah, large language models capable of generating entire articles are fairly new. But I have not seen any convincing evidence they are making the internet worse. In fact they may be making the internet better.

The internet is not as comprehensive as you might think. A lot of topics, especially obscure ones, have no good results. And now with AI people can plug the holes in the search results.

And what if there are good results already? Then Google’s algorithms will bubble up the good stuff to the top. And it may be that an AI generated article actually beats out a human generated article.

Everyone hates AI for some reason. But I’ve read some human articles that were trash. Like one article was like, “I got fired writing for Medium”. And then you scroll down and it was like, “It was just a dream.” Like WTF.

I don’t know why AI is hated so much but it can write some pretty solid articles. Not great, but a lot of human articles aren’t great either. I’ve actually had it write some articles just for me privately about things I’m interested in like marketing my app and writing pieces to give me background on current events like the Israel Hamas war.

You know why people hate Google search results now? They’re entitled. They just want Google to do everything for them. But you know what? Garbage in, garbage out. If you give Google a garbage search term of course it’s going to give you garbage in return.

Like I said in another post:

And when you do have the key phrases ‘watercooler effect’ and ‘weak ties’ it’s much easier to research. You can plug those terms into a search engine and get really good results. Not the random SEO garbage you would get if you just plugged in ‘serendipity’ into Google.

You need to do research yourself. Google is not going to tell you everything. Google is trying to do that, but it’s not a mind reader.

This is how it has always worked. You don’t ask Google to write an essay for you, you go to various sources and they tell you about more sources. Or maybe you just plagiarize Wikipedia, whatever floats your boat.

Google is a starting point, not a destination. And it is not getting worse. People are just getting lazier.

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