Video Discription |
A lot of people have been pointing out that Google Search feels like it's been getting worse recently. With more ads, fewer relevant articles, and blog posts that span for thousands of words without giving any relevant information, it's easy to see what these people are upset about.
In this video, I want to talk about why google search sucks, why google search is getting worse, and what we can do about google search becoming bad.
CHAPTERS:
00:00 Intro & My Complaints About Google
01:28 Personal Anecdote About My Dog
03:13 My Dog Walks In (he's very cute)
03:37 Search Engine Optimization
05:03 How Google Makes Money
07:25 Google Essentially Has A Monopoly on Search
08:25 The Solution
CONDENSED SCRIPT:
Part 1:
If I google something simple like why are eggs so expensive, this article from USA today comes up Why are eggs so expensive? The cost of a carton has skyrocketed If i click on it and start reading it says: Shoppers across the nation have been scrambling for months to keep up with soaring egg prices.
Prices continue to skyrocket - up 60% in December from a year earlier.
Last year, the average price for a dozen large Grade A eggs in the U.S. was $1.93 in January.
The high prices prompted a "He went to Kroger" meme, with an egg in place of an engagement ring in the "He went to Jared" jewelry advertisement.
None of that has anything to do with why the prices are high! It's telling me that prices are high, which I already knew because I was googling why the prices were high, and then it talks about a meme? That's not even a little bit relevant.
It's understandably frustrating if your dog regularly vomits after getting up in the morning, adding to the never-ceasing list of daytime damands.
What's more, it can really be concerning when your dog throws up at all, and a lot of dog owners are left wondering if morning throw ups are a reason to make an appointment with the vet.
Like what even is this? This should be a pretty simple search, and the first thing I find is actual paragraphs of word vomit saying how much it sucks when your dog throws up in the morning, Like, Yes I know, that's why I'm looking for solutions.
Part 2:
According to Google, search results are ranked on five main factors.
They are: Meaning which is trying to decide the what you actually want to know, for example I could type in how to change a light bulb, how to replace a lightbuld or how to switch a light bulb, and Google would give me just about the same results for each because it understands the meaning.
The second is relevance of the content, which is just how relevant is everything indexed on google to your search Third is quality of content,which is self explanatory but very important that you remember because we'll come back to that one Fourth is usability of web pages, how fast do they load etc etc And fifth is context and settings which is like, where you are in the world, what language do you speak, and so on.
Part 3:
Google has one main ad network that runs on a bunch of different channels.
The one thing that all of these share is that they can only show you ads, if you're on Google or youtube or something in order to see the ads.
You click on one of these and while reading the article you see some display ads on the side and or bottom of the website, This website also has a youtube link embedded in it, and before the video plays, you get a youtube ad. That's three major opportunities Google has had to try and sell you something, and that's money that's be actively charged to it's advertisers, And it couldn;t have charged any of that money to it's advertisers if you didn't stick around to look, and you wouldn't have stuck around to look if Googe had immediately given you the answer.
Part 5:
Google's market share is insane, I for example make videos on youtube, I have a gmail account, these scripts are written in google docs, you get the idea.
The company I work for is pretty big and we use google sheets and google docs for everything and all have emails made through google suite, there are other huge tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft, but as far as consumer facing tech companies go, most people actively use google products everyday.
So if Google has a monopoly, and they have no motivation to make the product better for consumers by making is more efficient and useful, what's the solution for us.
If I type those same questions into Google, but add the word reddit at the end, look what happens.
The world is full of information and all of it's available online, and sometimes I want a nice long article with a story about how something happened, but so much of what I want to know is quick and easy, but that's being locked away behind a system that's designed to squeeze as much money out of me as possible, and that, ladies is gentlemen, is why google search kinda sucks. |