How Google Has Changed for the Worse in Just 2 Screenshots
Google used to be about providing relevant search results to people looking for information on the web.
Nowadays, Google is more about providing relevant paid advertising to people looking for information on the web. Search results have become secondary. Don’t believe me?
Look at these two screenshots. The first is from the year 2000, when Google first rolled out AdWords, its first user-friendly advertising platform.
Now, here’s the same search in a private browsing window in Google in 2019, with the same sized above-the-fold screen capture:
Some differences become immediately obvious. One is that Google has ditched any clear visual distinction or indicator between the advertisements and the organic search results. Gone is the yellow-tinted background box from the advertisements and the words, “Sponsored Links.”
They are replaced by results that look exactly like organic results, except they sport a tiny box in front of each URL that simple says “Ad.” (You just have to know, as Google Help doesn’t explain [at least anywhere I could find], that these are actually sponsored links, paid advertisements.) As you can see, most of the results in 2019 above the fold are advertisements. In fact, everything in that screenshot — except a single organic search result — is an ad.
That’s why it’s difficult to believe Google when it says, “We sell advertising, not search results.” Well, of course you’re not selling search results. Because you’ve pushed nearly all of the organic search results off of the above the fold area. (And as any web developer or UI expert can tell you, above the fold is the most valuable and looked-at piece of real estate on a website.)
Because Google is also now placing a map in its search results for things it thinks you want local results for, you’ll have to scroll more than halfway down the page before you get to more organic search results.
“Shop on Google” — sounds more consumer-friendly, like, “Hey, I’m just shopping on Google!” — has replaced “Sponsored Links” on the right-hand column as well (although they do have a little “Sponsored” next to it). The images are nice, too, because organic search results don’t have images. Guess which link a user is more likely to click on?
Google knows all of this, of course. It has hundreds of UI /UX, personalization, and marketing experts on staff, and knows that this page generates thousands of clicks per day for its advertisers. And far fewer clicks per day for its organic search results.
This is what 19 years of “advancement” and nudging user behavior looks like. You go from a search engine offering organic search results front and center, clearly differentiated from sponsored advertising, to one where the organic search results have clearly become secondary to advertising. The line between them has been intentionally blurred.
Others have said it before me, but it bears repeating — Google is first and foremost a marketing company, and it is secondary to its work as a search engine company. It’s time to carefully consider what that means to our society as we move forward into the next decade.
