The googol-sized problem at Google
When I first started using the Internet, it was during the time where Google was starting to gain traction as the Search Engine. This was shocking to me, and it kept being that way, for Google’s results were just so much better. You could put Yahoo’s side-by-side and make a comparison and the result was just astounding.
A couple of years ago, I decided to delete all the data that Google has on me. Or at least the one that it lets us delete through the Settings. This opened my eyes because the next time I performed a Google Search, the results were so unusable, I realised the “good” results were so because it simple had collected who I am and what I consider to be deemable of clicks. From this experience, I started using Duck Duck Go. Now, I only ever use Google when a DDG search does not give me the results I want.
Lately, I have been hearing the complaints of people around me, saying that Google results are bad. And they are, for most of the results in the first page are just sponsored so that you get them. The business plan of money through clicks is, obviously, at the expense of good results for the end user.
Google being bad at being Google, I think, is because of the ads-vision that has tarnished most of what Google is. Even when Google itself is not a good creator other than the Search Engine itself (for it bought Youtube, and copied Gmail), it is making all of its content really unusable by being so tied up to the past, and, as a consequence, it fails to create the future.
On the other hand, a secondary reason is that most people making websites and companies are aiming at making the most out of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is, instead of creating and crafting good, significant connections with potential clients and readers, it merely maximises a technical issue, which is bound to fail in the long run, for everything is the same.
We see that Google issue is not that it was bad at what it originally did, for it clearly was better than their competitors, such as Google or Bing. Yet, the rise of DDG as the de facto Search Engine is not because it is better at doing it, but rather the old ones just became a mere glimpse of its glorious past.
A social issue
Google is not the only one that has been trapped into the ideas of monetization through ads. Facebook was once the quintessential social media, once it fixed all the issues that MySpace, hi5, fotolog, etc. However, it is now a place that practically no one I know uses.
Facebook’s (now Meta’s) tactic was to buy other applications (Instagram, WhatsApp) so that it would still retain a significant portion of the market. Their inability to innovate led users, like me, to other places like Instagram or Twitter, where the connections felt more real.
Twitter is now driven by a model that makes no senses coming from Twitter itself, as well as ridiculous censors and policies. Now, with its API-prices unveiled, it is safe to say that it also failed to deliver its users what they wanted.
It also seems that social media fell down this rabbit hole of ads-ifying themselves to the point where they are either no longer usable to various users. Mastodon is not better at being Twitter than Twitter is (or rather was), but as with Search Engines, these federated forms of communication rose to prominence precisely because the old ones became useless.
Enshittification
This is a process that Cory Doctorow has been pointing out for a while now. These companies have been shifting the value from the user, to the investors, and then to themselves, when it becomes utterly shit, hence it is called “Enshittification”.
This has also happened at Amazon, where finding good quality items to buy is practically impossible, for vendors are forced to pay for exposure, which inevitably lowers the quality of their products, to compensate for it.
It isn’t that Google is the only one in this enshittified land, but I think it is somewhat different from the others. Facebook (or now Meta), Twitter or Amazon are a particular taste of the internet, i.e., social media or a store. But this happening to Google, which is the door for much of the world to the internet. This implies that people will become used to being in the mud, no matter what type of information they browse for on the internet.
For these people, the internet itself will have been enshittified because all the results will be. And this also stops them from knowing real, verifiable (even peer-reviewed) information from the utter nonsensical rants of people just trying to promote their contorted view of the world.