What Happened To Google Search?

it's 1998 and this is the garage of Susan goshiski also known as the world headquarters of Google thanks to the pagerank algorithm these two guys developed doing their phds they went from this garage to 8.5 billion search queries per day controlling 92 percent of all online searches and growing year after year to a record 250 billion dollars in revenues in 2021. but things are not as good as they see if you look under the surface there are six things that are slowly killing the world's number one website from the inside out and with these we are only getting started so I need to solve a very obscure and nerdy problem I need to update the firmware inside my custom mechanical keyboard which keeps giving me errors for whatever reason so I open up Google and start to search once twice three times no matter which keywords I use I'm never able to get to a solution and even with tricks from my years of Googling weird stuff on the internet I'm not able to find anything and so I lose my patience I go on Reddit and in one minute here's a solution huh I swear that a few years back I could have just gone to Google and find whatever I was looking for and I'm not alone thinking this 20 years ago the web was a very different place an open field made up of independent websites blogs and message boards the web at the turn of the Millennium was like a huge continent spending for miles and miles inhabited by a variety of different tribes full of small towns and this is the world that Google was built for a chaotic mass of websites with different layouts different styles in different languages and Google was the way you were able to find stuff in this mess but over time something happened this unconquered and chaotic continent of users websites and information was starting to organize itself colonizers entered the game and they started taking over parts of the web Reddit Twitter Facebook Myspace where making sure that the conversation happened inside of their borders news tutorials interesting discussions new ideas that once found a home in independent blogs and forums starting to shift inside social media and online platforms what was once a continent made up of small villages is now controlled by these large kingdoms it didn't take long for these kingdoms to realize the power that they have accumulated they want their users to increase engagement to stay on their platform to increase the number of daily active users as so they started building walls around them if you ever open a search result from Instagram or Facebook on Google search you know exactly what I mean what you get is not the information you're looking for by a login page and endless prompts to download the app for a better experience these kingdoms are not meant to work with Google search Google's rise to popularity was in an era where the web looked like this and while Google surely evolved over the years its core structures are remain the same a list of links on a page something that was built for the internet that no longer exists there are still wild lands outside the kingdom of big platforms but what is out there is not what it used to be because these lands have been taken over by the devious machine of SEO as Google and search engines started to get billions of visits it didn't take long for businesses to realize that having your website come up in a search result was the ultimate marketing move instead of paying for advertising you're getting people that are already looking for something in your Niche for absolutely free and so how do you make this happen how do you get to the top well you write articles based exactly on what people are looking for you staff the most optimized keywords into these articles and you try to reference your product or service as much as possible publish rinse and repeat SEO has evolved from making sure your website has the right title and description to companies churning out millions of articles with the sole purpose of getting a spot into specific keywords results so must show that today the global market for SEO Services is valued at 50 billion dollars over the last 20 years the SEO machine has become so efficient that now you can just hire specialized writers with absolutely no knowledge of your subject but that can write content so efficiently and cheaply and it's just a no-brainer and since very recently you don't even need people to do this you want to see how much time it takes me to write an article completely images using AI most search results today are simply trash is the same set of regurgitated information that has been either fed into an AI or researched by a low paid contractor and people looking to create quality content or have interesting discussions are fleeing and all this information is either outside the reach of Google such as Discord servers which are private or it's simply not made to be discovered by a search engine but among all these kingdoms there is one where internet users have retreated in droves and this is the one that is changing Google search the most Reddit who's the biggest competitor of Google search Microsoft bank or some privacy based Alternatives like dac.go but Google's largest competitor today is actually Reddit as a traditional independent web dried up under the SEO and content machine users found a home on Reddit and in the process they unknownly built the world's largest repository of user generated quality and valuable information on any imaginable topic but at the same time Reddit allowed its content to be fully accessible by the Crawlers that powers search engines like Google and the people took notice there's evidence from hundreds if not thousands of people that are complaining that the only way they're able to find anything on Google today is by appending Reddit to the end of their search and while Google searches for Instagram Facebook or SnapChat I've peaked with the platform's growth Google searches for Reddit have only been growing steadily and without a sign of stopping for the last 15 years and they have accelerated even more in the last two and while to many people this might look like just a bunch of nerds on the internet finding information in an alternative matter this is actually much more than that when we think of globally successful products the ones that we use every day they all started by solving a very specific problem for a very specific set of people and then they expanded from there reaching the mainstream the first GoPro started as a way for the founder and his friends to take from photos while surfing the first version of Facebook started as a way to connect people at Harvard in the late 90s when Google was born most of Internet users were nerds Engineers thinkers creatives they liked the minimal design and the page rank algorithm which was much better than competitors at the time and so they decided yeah Google is the one and everyone else tagged along these people are dearly adopters the ones that represent the first group of users for any big product and these same people are getting fed up with what Google search has become today this video was inspired by one of the most popular posts ever on Hacker News a news board mostly used by Tech insiders Google has 4 billion users so having a very small part of the user base complaining about what Google has become shouldn't be that big of an issue but the key thing is who these people are these Tech Crowds Are the most likely candidate to be the early adopters of whatever will come after the Dominion of Google search among these people are Tech influencers entrepreneurs and Venture capitalists and they are eager to start the next Google or to throw money at what could become the next Big Talk of the internet and Wild Tech routes are building the next successor to Google the younger generation has already found it in July the senior vice president of Google Search said in an interview that almost 40 percent of young people gen Z when they're looking for a place for lunch for example or for many basic searches they don't go to Google anymore they go to tick tock or Instagram while Google and basically all the other search engines have stayed true to the model of a list of links on a page the rest of the web was evolving first with images and now with video the internet today is simply more visual than ever and this is simply not gonna cut it anymore I tried using Tick Tock for a week to search for basic things around me and it's been great for example when trying to find new things to do in my city where Google was giving me this list of the same regurgitated top tens on Tick Tock I could see videos of famous attractions but also very obscure and not well-known places now Google owns YouTube they're one of the key players in AI they own the biggest search engine of them all and so why aren't they connecting the dots and making bold Innovative moves with Google search well because despite everything that we talked about Google search is making more money than ever 200 billion dollars this is how much Google made from advertising last year but if you look deeper things do not look as rosy for Google the way we can calculate how much money a product makes is by multiplying the total potential market so how many people will potentially use your product your market share so how many people have actually convinced to use your product and the revenue that you generate per each individual user let's start with a potential Market which in our case is the total number of Internet users but as we reach 5 billion internet users most of the world is already using the web and so while this number is still growing the pace of this growth is slowing down as connecting the remaining people in remote or less developed areas will be progressively more difficult so now let's look at market share how many of these billions of Internet users actually use Google and this is where the company has a complete Dominion as they control over 90 percent of all online searches and to achieve this number they built a great product yes but they also leveraged on the power of default default bias is the tendency that we all have in trusting the default option we are given and this is also one of the main reasons why Google built Chrome and Android while they don't make money directly from chrome or Android having control on which browser or mobile operating system people use allows them to set Google as the default search engine Sundar pichai which is the current CEO of Google in 2007 was working as a product manager for the Google Toolbar and he saw the importance of being the default option and that's how we convinced Google's co-founders to create their own browser which turned out to be Google Chrome today however Google has to pay a hefty price for keeping its default status each year Google negotiates an agreement with apple to be the default browser on all iOS and Mac OS devices and this doesn't come cheap as estimates put the 2021 agreement to be around 15 billion dollars and this might not even last that long Apple has been hiring search engineers in the last years and they have been testing on some iOS and Mac searches their own search engine and if they simply launch it and put it as a default option for all Apple devices this means Google's market share can plummet by 20 or 30 percent in a single day and finally on the third factor which is the revenue per user this is where the company has decided to turn up the dial to the max in the last years and it's showing while sponsored links were limited to two or three per search in some cases that now take up the entire first part of the screen and this is not only happening on Search Here on YouTube you will surely have noticed that the amount of ads before and during each video has gone up but with any AD base product there is only so much you can turn up the style because the more you increase the number of ads on a product the more frustrating The Experience becomes from users and if you push things too far people will simply break the habit of using your product and go with the next best option and so now what well for the first time since the internet has entered our homes the old Juggernaut that is Google is starting to lose its footing on what made it great search and this can be the golden opportunity for new companies to jump into a market that was previously inaccessible and startup once again the search engine works on one side we have Google and despite everything that we've seen today they're still undoubtedly at the top and their growth is only starting to slow so they still have time to react before it's too late what they have been working on and they think is the future of search is multi-input search combining text with information from The Real World and this will be especially useful for the next generation of devices like AR glasses but also in the last years we've seen a Renaissance of Google Alternatives more privacy based but also with different functionality and a different way to interpret searches also together the search Wars of the 2000s ended up with Google winning but in the 2020s things might be very different if this video reaches a thousand likes I will start working on a sequel focusing on the upcoming search engine Wars of the 2020s and in the meantime here's another video that you might enjoy [Music]

Channel: Enrico Tartarotti

Views: 3,109,244

Keywords: google, downfall, google decline, why google is, why google is bad, why google is not working, why google failed, why google is failing, will google fail, google bad, google search fail, google search bad, bad google search results, enrico tartarotti, weird things spotted on google maps, google search secrets, google maps secrets, google alternative, google search alternatives

Id: 48AOOynnmqU

Length: 14min 4sec (844 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 25 2022