What You Water Grows - A Message For Google

People have been complaining that Google is getting worse. Allegedly, search engine optimized bullshit is taking over and drowning out the information and websites people want to see.

I can’t help but wonder if the folks complaining are looking back at the Google of old with rose-colored glasses. Google has always had problems. In the early 2000s, Google searches regularly brought me to keyword-stuffed pages with largely incoherent, probably machine-generated, writing.

But Google’s critics have a point. The spammy sites from two decades ago were transparently garbage. Recently, there’s been a rise in a corporate and polished form of SEO-optimized bullshit.

Websites like Forbes, CNET, U.S. News, and Business Insider dominate search results on queries that follow the form of "Best [product or service]". Deep-pocketed parasites like Red Ventures buy up popular websites (e.g., CNET, AllConnect, Bankrate) and ruthlessly pursue profits over editorial integrity.

Beating Mediocre

HouseFresh recently published a great article detailing how a handful of media giants take advantage of Google’s algorithms across a large portfolio of websites.

Sampling “Best [Product]”-type articles from the media giants, I get the feeling that the content is…mediocre? Not great. Not terrible. The authors are often reasonably capable staff writers or freelance contractors. But they rarely show genuine passion or deep expertise about the product categories they’re engaging with.

Nilay Patel points out how the structure and content of the articles reflect the incentives created by Google and each website’s financial partners.

It’s been over a year since I last told you to just buy a Brother laser printer, and that article has fallen down the list of Google search results because I haven’t spent my time loading it up with fake updates every so often to gain the attention of the Google search robot.

It’s weird because the correct answer to the query “what is the best printer” has not changed, but an entire ecosystem of content farms seems motivated to constantly update articles about printers in response to the incentive structure created by that robot’s obvious preferences. Pointing out that incentive structure and the culture that’s developed around it seems to make a lot of people mad, which is also interesting!

There must be something like 100 million printers sold worldwide each year. It’s a huge industry. I imagine quite a few people know a ton about printers and can write well.

Maybe one of these people spent thirty years in the printer industry and knows it in and out. Maybe one gets excited for the chance to rant about the different business models involved in inkjet printers versus laser printers. Perhaps another could spew out interesting facts about the electricity cost disadvantage certain types of printers have due to the necessity of constantly keeping ink drums warm or something.

I wish someone like this was running a website with a name like PrinterGeek.com and dominating Google’s search results while earning a bunch of well-deserved money. But for some reason, we get articles from places like fucking Forbes.com drawing top spots on Google.

Why don’t we have more websites like my imaginary PrinterGeek.com? Do the people who could make these websites assume they won’t rise to the top of Google even if they create the best resource for consumers?

Google’s Ongoing Update

Google is in the midst of a major algorithm update. One of the major changes has been surfacing way more content from Reddit. I love the change. For years, I’ve been adding “reddit” to the end of my searches when I want to see regular people talking about something. I didn’t realize how often I did this until the 2023 Reddit Blackout. When a huge fraction of Reddit was unavailable, I found Google far less useful.

Google’s ongoing update also led to a massive decline in rankings for small and niche websites focused on reviewing or recommending products. (Coverage Critic falls into this category. I don't pretend to be an impartial observer.) Broadly, these sites have been hit hard. My guess is that Google’s algorithms struggle to distinguish between (1) a small site with a lot of affiliate links and high-quality content vs. (2) a small site with a lot of affiliate links and low-quality content.

I expect Google’s uncertainty about the quality of small sites leaves it with two options when handling some queries:

• Serve an almost certainly mediocre-but-not-terrible article from a website like Forbes
• Serve a probably shitty but possibly good or even great article from a small, niche website

Given these options, I’m not surprised Google is updating its algorithms to favor the former more heavily.

A Revealing Contradiction

There's something of a contradiction in these updates. Surfacing more Reddit threads is great because people want to see informal stuff written by random people who know what they’re talking about. But that same kind of content, published on standalone sites instead of Reddit, is now getting less attention.

Could Google get better at spotting promising small sites in their infancy? If great niche sites reliably got attention from Google in their early days, more people would build them. I'd love that. We don’t need more U.S News or Forbes-style content farms piggybacking on their once-respected brand names.