Almost 8.5 billion search queries are made on Google every day. People’s thirst for knowledge is unquenched. But no matter what you search for: the results are overloaded, full of advertising and product ads. You have to, well, search for a while to get good search results.
The Google search is dying, that was the headline on a scene blog in the spring, which was admittedly quite sensational. Influential people from Silicon Valley have also often railed against the function that made the Internet usable for many people in the first place.
In addition to the flood of advertising, there is criticism that Google is increasingly referring to its own pages instead of to resources on the web. Like the data journalism portal The Markup found out in a study of 15,000 search queries, between 40 percent and two-thirds of all links on the first result page now refer to Google pages.
It is no longer important that websites should be understandable
In addition, the critics have identified another main culprit. It is the so-called search engine optimization, often abbreviated as SEO (“Search Engine Optimization”). It has long been less important whether texts and articles on websites are comprehensible and informative for people, but how well the automated scanners of the search engines can read them. In order to achieve this, an entire industry is now working on naming search terms as frequently as possible in the articles to end up high up in the result list.
As is so often the case: the form beats the content. You can see this impressively if you use one of the common SEO tools. These assign a numerical value depending on how well a written text will do in the search results. Unfortunately, this type of software works quite sub-complex. With some programs it is enough to combine a bit of dummy text with the corresponding search term in order to get a good ranking. So it’s no wonder that, according to an older analysis by the online market research company Similarweb, between half and two-thirds of all searches do not end with a click on another website. The user is left at a loss.
Danny Sullivan is Google’s PR director for search and thinks some of the recent frustrations really just reflect how good search has gotten. “We’re looking for things today that we couldn’t have imagined 15 years ago and assume we’ll find exactly what we want,” he said. “Our expectations have continued to rise. So we demand more from this tool.” So is it just because people are so spoiled?
Many “Googles” instead of one Google
The economist knows that monopolies are not necessarily the best breeding ground for innovation. That’s why the small browser provider Brave is now testing a new tool that rethinks Internet searches. Users should be able to customize their search results. With the not exactly subtly named “Googles” function, you can use filters to readjust the selection of websites that appear first in the search results.
Users can therefore choose which sources the search engine searches for results. Do you want to hide the pretty but meaningless pictures from Pinterest or the stupid questions from Quora, which are otherwise notoriously high up? Should it only be specialist blogs that are searched for? Does the publication have to be more left-leaning or right-leaning?
The function represents a “fundamental advance towards algorithmic transparency and openness in the search,” says Josep M. Pujol, head of the search department at Brave. It is not clear, however, how the self-selected sorting affects the filter bubble problem which is said to have led to parallel societies on the Internet in recent years. It may be that users with search filters only find the results they really want to see. Stupid only if that further cements the existing worldview.