>> Does anyone at Google come into work actually thinking about “organizing the world’s information”?
This is the poignant question IMO.
The texture of the internet has changed drastically since the golden age of "Googling" for things. I feel like the current search vs. SEO paradigm has become a losing battle. The bad actors have adapted to Google's algorithms and now resemble the holes in Search's strategy like some over evolved contagion. The main issues I see as a lay person are:
- Bounce time and other metrics actively incentivizing content to be obfuscated and waste user's time.
- Content theft being viable and disincentivizing high quality content that can be copied easily.
- Walled garden sites that don't want to surrender their content for ad impressions and aren't easily or impossible to index.
I feel like solutions to the above problems would involve Google killing its own golden advertisement goose.
Maybe there are high influence Googlers that do come into work and think about “organizing the world’s information . . .” but a "in way that makes Google the most money" is inevitably tacked on.
I don't think it's the bad actors winning over the algorithm. It's the algorithm forgetting what the internet was actually about.
There was a major search update a few years ago that emphasized "authority". If your website was considered more reputable or an established brand, you ranked higher.
This is completely against the ethos of the internet. The internet was always about new ways to find and organize information. On the internet, CNN has no greater reputation than some random blog. Yet, if you were a mainstream brand, Google would deem you to be more authoritative than some internet-only website.
You can see this most clearly in medical queries. WebM and MayoClinic top the results, even though they're filled with generic fluff. Internet-only websites and forums dedicated to a specific illness rarely get on the front page, even though they have superior information.
Funnily enough, many people on here have the opposite perception of Google: they argue that search results have been hijacked by no-name blogs and that reputable authorities are further down the page.
That, too, has its origins in Google's decision to focus on authority. That opened the gates to SEOs being able to acquire authority signals without actually being an authority or hosting authoritative content.
The topic-specific forum with thousands of pages of detailed user-generated guides and content doesn't have the social media following, domain authority, etc. that Google considers to be "authoritative". Meanwhile, the SEO-spammed trash can easily acquire backlinks and followers to game the system.
Get rid of these authority markers and go back to a more organic web if you want to save search.
> This is completely against the ethos of the internet. The internet was always about new ways to find and organize information
I disagree this being applicable to Search. Granted, SEO spam is ranking higher, but a lot of the "internet" today is littered with low quality content. It's important to rank higher quality content.
The second problem is misinformation. It's hard to differentiate information from misinformation. Sometimes misinformation can become information with new data.
The question is, how can an algorithm determine which content is higher quality and not misinformation. "Authority" can be one proxy signal for it.
I feel in this stage of the internet, we don't need an index over everything, but just curated content. This is hard to do for Google or Microsoft, because they'd get sued hard. Look at Section 230 case in the supreme court [1].
I don’t believe search engines should decide what is or what is not misinformation. Search engines should focus purely on indexing and discovering information, not arbitrating the truth. Just show me information and let me decide whether that’s true or not.
The web as a whole never came up with an answer to the question "As someone in possession of valuable information, why would I want to allow that information to be indexed, which would allow someone to trivially copy it?"
"Information wants to be free" was fine for ~1990-2010, until Google et al. took advantage of it to build walled gardens they could profit from.
In retrospect, I feel like if the in-web-standards micromonetization efforts had been adopted, we'd be in a better place today, because there would have been better revenue channels than "Whoever controls ads."
And/or differentiate and regulate search as a privileged common carrier-style business class, prevented from reusing their web scraping for other products.
I think a big reason why ads became the dominant way of revenue generation on the web (as opposed to micromonetization) was systemic issues that just took time to solve.
a) early internet adopters were mainly young people who didn’t have a lot of purchasing power yet
b) a complete lack of trusted means for online payment
More recently things have started to trend away from this because these two issues are now solved. You can see this in social media like Discord or Telegram who have a freemium model, movie/tv streaming like netflix or disney plus, new entrants like kagi or the general proliferation of SaaS offerings which can now sustain a premium userbase where previously you would’ve opted for an ads based model (think of the n different todolist providers etc.)
Ads have existed across mediums though, from print, to TV and now on the web. IMO they reflect a fundamental unwillingness of the general public to pay for information.
I think that for the majority, the issue isn't really the money, but the friction. Having to set up an account, or pull out a credit card, is an enormous friction point. The path of least resistance is to tolerate the ads.
A proper micropayment system could greatly reduce or eliminate the friction of payments, but we still don't really have one.
It certainly feels like there are some regulatory loopholes/oversights being abused.
Maybe just make it illegal (or actually just enforce existing laws) to link to websites that violate copyright laws (from pages with monetization) and force the market to sort things out?
It would be the end of an era for the internet in many different ways, but maybe the wild west needs to just end?
There are serious issues around that, though, especially if the restraint is based on copyright violators. Copyright law (at least in the US) is a hot mess and unfair all around.
And there's a clear free speech aspect. Why should I not be able to mention the URL of any other place on the net? If there's a drug dealer in my neighborhood, there's no law (nor should there be) saying I can't tell people where the house is. Why should it be different online?
Sure Google is a lot more than search at this point, so it's not the right mission. Though, I would say "organizing the world's information" is at least one of the right missions for the company.
Funny enough - Satya Nadella introduced a new mission statement at Microsoft shortly after he became CEO[1].
It's pretty anodyne, but by design - it's a way to push the company towards different ways of operating by creating a pretext to say "X project is part of the new mission and here's why" from a top-down perspective.
It sounds pretty generic for me. I mean, Google sells productivity tools and services. "Improving productivity" is just table stakes, not something that's a useful mission statement. Vague or overly broad mission statements are pretty much the same as no mission statement at all.
This is the poignant question IMO.
The texture of the internet has changed drastically since the golden age of "Googling" for things. I feel like the current search vs. SEO paradigm has become a losing battle. The bad actors have adapted to Google's algorithms and now resemble the holes in Search's strategy like some over evolved contagion. The main issues I see as a lay person are:
- Bounce time and other metrics actively incentivizing content to be obfuscated and waste user's time.
- Content theft being viable and disincentivizing high quality content that can be copied easily.
- Walled garden sites that don't want to surrender their content for ad impressions and aren't easily or impossible to index.
I feel like solutions to the above problems would involve Google killing its own golden advertisement goose.
Maybe there are high influence Googlers that do come into work and think about “organizing the world’s information . . .” but a "in way that makes Google the most money" is inevitably tacked on.