Is Google the Past Now?

The Great Wall of China still stands. It’s an incredible structure (apocryphally visible from space). Visited by awed millions each year, it still awes with its scale. And yet the purpose for which it was built no longer exists. The world where China was threatened by The Horde of the Mongols no longer exists. In fact, the Horde of the Mongols no longer exists.

So what if I told you that Google was built for a world that no longer exists?

In the beginning…

In the beginning, the internet was a vast, sprawling universe of independent websites. Some were published by companies, but many were personal passion projects: labours of love where someone with an extra-obscure interest would teach themselves some basic HTML, and document some minutiae or other. If that was beyond them, they could use platforms like Blogger.com to self-publish their knowledge and opinions.

Taken together, it quickly came to represent a decent chunk of the entire sum of human knowledge, and Google was our conduit to that knowledge.

Google’s mission at the time was “to organise the world’s information” and so it was originally conceived: a gigantic index of all these untold billions of web pages across millions of domains, organised and made searchable.

The achievement of building the technology necessary to retrieve all of that information in a fraction of a second and identify the best 10 answers to almost any question was one of the early wonders of the internet.

But that is not the internet of 2023. Those small, independent websites still exist, but they are no longer the core of the web.

Google co-opted some of them. They acquired Blogger.com in 2003 and a few years later its entire infrastructure was apparently frozen in aspic. The available templates and tools have been unchanged since 2013. The thriving blogosphere has long since atrophied as users have moved to social networks, or to other services such as Substack. Blogs still abound by the thousand, but they are no longer part of mainstream discourse. The most common page on blogspot may well be “no posts found” followed by “blog has been removed.”

Where did all the websites go?

While researching this, two or the four or five blogs I visited had a spam interstitial. The sidebars of once essential blogs are full of dead links.

So be honest: when was the last time you found a blogspot link in a Google search result? Or, indeed, any website that wasn’t a corporate affair?

Blogs in general were supplanted by social media. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. Each more accessible and instant to use than the last. They were easier to maintain (much easier to write a tweet than it is a blog post of a few hundred words) and you don’t have to worry about presentation: you just type into a box, hit ‘post’ and you’re done.

Commerce too became ever more centralised. Yes, there are still millions of web stores out there selling goods independently of the big platforms, but it’s the big platforms where the action happens.

My sister-in-law wants to take her small knitting/crafts business online, and wants a website. I know I can build her one now easier than ever before thanks to platforms like Shopify, Magento or WooCommerce. But I also know that her website will never get any traffic. She won’t have the know how or connections to promote her identity. She’ll never have enough equity in the site to get it to rank in Google. In effect, she’ll be buying a shop on a back street in a forgotten market town somewhere in the north of England, when all the footfall is in the big fancy shopping mall called Etsy with free parking, wifi and a coffee shop. Her best bet might even be just to sell to locals through Facebook.

And for vertical searches, who truly begins their journey with Google? I renew my car insurance every year, but it must be a decade now since I used Google as part of that journey. Holidays? Booking.com or AirBnB. Flights from Leeds Bradford? Skyscanner. Doodads for my guitar? Amazon or eBay.

But my habits are anecdotal and personal. There’s a bigger threat over the horizon in the form of a youth who never even knew the internet – and likely never will.

Google is for old people?

I have two kids in their teens. Recently I’ve taken to quizzing them about things to see how they understand the world. They have no concept, for example, of what a “TV channel” is (they don’t even know what the BBC is – although after much prompting one of them offered “is that something to do with CBeebies?”).

And I doubt very much that they know what a website is. Their experience of the web isn’t that of surfing and parsing a multitude of websites along a journey: it’s recipes from TikTok, news and comment on YouTube and chatting to their friends on Instagram or Snapchat.

In fact, when they want extra information? They ask me to “search it up”. By which they mean “Google it.” Even that brand name that Google strives so hard to not become a verb has little resonance. Search is something that dads and grandads do. If they do ever search on Google, they certainly don’t visit 10 web pages: they will, as often as not, take whatever they see in the knowledge box as being definitive, copy and paste it and move on.

The impulse to visit a few websites to check the information simply isn’t in their internal wiring.

You think ChatGPT and competing machine learning engines won’t erode that model further? Especially when it’s hooked into voice recognition and a good text-to-speech program. Who will go to all the hassle of opening a browser and typing something into a box and reading an answerwhen you can just shout “hey Chatbot – what year was the great fire of London?” or “is Lord Pizza open yet?”

I was sceptical for a long time about such technology. I’m a man of a generation who first saw the internet. I didn’t believe that the internet would end newspapers. Or record companies. I couldn’t foresee that livestreamed video games would be a larger part of a person’s life than sports commentary.

But I do know this: Google is built on foundations that are being eroded. The open internet it was designed to serve has withered and may be a historical curiosity a decade or two from now.

And Google itself has become… dumber. When I first saw Google it blew me away with its power to understand what I meant by my pidgin English queries. Today…?

Well. I record my own music using GarageBand. There are a million little problems to overcome, and through habit I still Google for answers. And yet Google will wilfully ignore the specifics. I use the free version on an iPad, but even if I put “+ipad” in my query, Google will return answers for the full-fat Mac version that are irrelevant to me. Increasingly, I turn to Reddit or YouTube for the answers. Google simply does not serve me what I need.

Like many of you, I find myself trying many increasingly abstruse search queries, trying to find the key to unlock the door.

Another example? If you look after a lot of websites (as we at Bronco do) you doubtless use Search Console as a tool to see how well the site is performing. It’s instructive now to see just how many pages Google chooses to simply stop indexing. I have one client with a blog with an unbroken run of content going back some 15 years. Literally everything published longer than 3 years ago is no longer indexed by Google. It will never again appear in a search result.

That original mission to “organise the world’s information” has subtly altered: now Google chooses what it thinks is worth organising. The reasons are obvious – indexing the entire internet costs vast sums of money. And much of the content is terrible, or outdated or not particularly relevant for most users. Google’s income is ads, and their cost is indexing. To increase profit they can only look to increase ad spend or cut costs in indexing – and ad spend now has to compete with social media, a resurgent TV landscape, and the unexpected rebirth of direct mail (check your doormat).

A long, slow death…?

So, with remorseless logic, Google is indexing less of the web – and doing that job worse than it used to. Much ‘content’ now resides on social media platforms that Google can’t even index to begin with. Alongside that, it has lost big chunks of valuable search traffic to dedicated, vertical-specific engines.

And now, over the horizon, comes the promise of true natural language search powered by machine learning AI. Google’s algorithm suddenly seems horribly defunct when you realise that AI’s growth in power is going to be exponential over the next couple of years.

It’s a bold claim to say that Google is over – and I used to speculate about that idea on these pages over a decade ago – but I think we could be on the verge of a new revolution in how we access information: and it’s just possible that Google won’t be part of that revolution at all.