A recent small medical issue has highlighted how much someone needs to disrupt Google Search. Google is no longer producing high quality search results in a significant number of important categories.

Health, product reviews, recipes are three categories I searched today where top results featured clickbait sites riddled with crappy ads. I’m sure there are many more. Feel free to reply to the thread with the categories where you no longer trust Google Search results.

I’m pretty sure the engineers responsible for Google Search aren’t happy about the quality of results either. I’m wondering if this isn’t really a tech problem but the influence of some suit responsible for quarterly ad revenue increases.

What would a paid version of Google Search results look like - where Google can just try to give me the best possible results and not be worried about generating revenue?

Also, how can a search category be SEO’d into ruin? Isn’t search engine optimization supposed to produce “better results”? Doesn’t Google exclusively control the results it displays….

The more I think about this, the more it looks like classic short term thinking. Juice ad revenue in the short run. Open the door to complete disruption in the long run…

This is why no software incumbent is truly protected from startup disruption. Inevitably the rot of a bad incumbent product starts from within…

Does search have network effects? Sure! Knowing what everyone is searching for (and which results they click on) allows Google to produce better results for me.

In another way it doesn’t - I get no direct benefit if you are using the same search engine as I am. We don’t interact with each other directly through search. So if the search results being displayed are no longer high quality… isn’t the network effect broken?