Decline of Google Search: Ads, SEO, and User Experience Issues

Google search has deteriorated significantly, prioritizing ads over genuine content and compromising user experience.

### The Decline of Google Search: Ads, AI, and User Experience
* 📉 Google search has significantly deteriorated, with an **overwhelming number of ads** appearing before organic content, making the search experience feel **frustrating and invasive**.
* 📰 The concept of "**the fold**," where essential information should be visible without scrolling, is now dominated by **sponsored content**, indicating that Google has **grown complacent** in attracting users.
* 🔍 Once a pioneer in delivering quick and accurate search results, Google now prioritizes **ad revenue over user satisfaction**, leading to a search environment where organic results often **fall short of expectations**.
* 🛒 Shopping searches reveal a stark shift, with product listings taking up **34% more space** on results pages since 2021, and organic results frequently failing to meet specific user needs, suggesting a deliberate strategy to **push users towards paid ads**.
* 💰 Google's revenue model thrives on **attention rather than user satisfaction**, as evidenced by the fact that **76.3% of its $847 billion revenue** in Q2 2024 stemmed from ads, primarily search ads.
* 🤖 The integration of AI into search results has further complicated the landscape, as these AI-generated overviews often **lack accuracy** and threaten to **replace the original content sources** that users rely on.
* ⚠ This shift reflects a broader trend of "**inification**," where services initially offer **high-quality products** but later compromise **user experience** to maximize profits, raising concerns about the future of Google as a **reliable search engine**.
* 🔒 To regain a better web experience, users are encouraged to consider tools like Surfshark VPN, which enhances privacy and browsing quality by **minimizing tracking and improving connection speeds**.

Google search has become a lot worse than you think. Look at this. Let's say how to secure my data. Okay, so 1, 2, 3, 4, four adverts. These are all sponsored links. Like, imagine if you clicked on one of our YouTube videos and I chose to start with four sponsored ads before I even got into the content. Google used to be magic. It's easy to take for granted nowadays, but the ability to just find anything you wanted in like 5 seconds was revolutionary when it was new. But I've been noticing more and more over the last few years things starting to feel a little off. So I've done a deep dive, no thanks to Google, and I found the three major reasons as to why Google search is not just in decline but it's borderline broken now. And the way that they started changing this results page is the first. Like, look at this again. Do you notice something? 'Cause aside from the fact that four ads before your content feels almost violating, the thing that's even worse is when you consider

something called the fold, the imagined line where if you want to see anything past it, you have to take action like scrolling down. The term comes from newspapers where you'd want to put the most important information not just on the front page but specifically on the top half of that front page so that people can see it even when the paper is folded up in stacks above the fold. Now, newspapers never got to a stage of having so much power that they could regularly afford to stick big adverts across their fold. They needed the fold to convince people to get the paper in the first place, but compare that to now where the entire fold is just sponsored content, and it's starting to feel like Google's gotten too comfortable. Google has become so at ease that they don't even feel like they need to convince people to use them anymore. This company used to pride specifically on how quickly their search engine finds you an accurate answer, but now you're either having to specifically invest more time just to scroll past their ads.

or trust that the ads have what you want. Spoiler: they do not. Otherwise, those posts would be at the top organically without having to pay to get there. Oh, and you might have forgotten, but a decade ago, these sponsored links used to be highlighted in yellow, indicating to the user in a very obvious way that these aren't organic search results, so that you could just filter them out. And sometimes they were in their own corded-off section to the right of the results. Not anymore. Now the sponsored search results look exactly like the genuine search results, apart from a tiny little, much less obvious sponsored text. And all of that is just for when you're searching for answers. Look what happens when you start searching for products. So, I've been doing a lot of searching recently for a new chair. Wow, yet again, not a single organic result insight, but instead an entire carousel of shopping ads. And I think there's something particularly interesting happening with these shopping ads, and I'm not even talking about the fact that no, it's not just you. These product

listings are taking up more real estate on the results page nowadays than they used to. They are 34% bigger just compared to 2021. But it's not even that. See, I do a lot more internet shopping than most people for one video. Sometimes we're buying 20 products. And so while this one is more of a feeling and it's a little harder to prove, it is really starting to feel like with shopping, Google is specifically making the organic search results bad to make the best way to shop directly from the ads. Like whenever I'm searching for something specific, like let's say I was trying to find the thinnest mini fridge to fit a particular space in my room. Thinnest mini fridge. And would you look at that? Something that completely fits the description I've typed. A fridge that's not too big and it's thin. So the sponsored results are spot on. Google clearly understands what I'm looking for. So what happens when I scroll down and look at the organic results? Okay, first up is

Amazon and nope, nope, nope, nope, uh, none of these products. Okay, so let's go back to Google search and just scroll down. Nope, that's not it, that's not it, that's not it. Nothing here is it. Every one of these fridges is short and wide, which is not what I was looking for. This is puzzling, right? Like, surely Google, with its current level of intelligence and review data, has the ability to take me straight to the single best-rated product for exactly what I'm looking for. And yet, does it not seem a little like Google's playing dumb? The difference between how tack-sharp they are with making sure that the sponsored recommendations are spot-on, but then at the very least not putting that same effort into their organic results, but maybe even deliberately making them less accurate. And when you look at the company's business model, it would make sense as to why they might do that. 'Cause here's the thing, Google doesn't make more money if you find the perfect product. It's not like they're out there

hoping you'll have an awesome Google Experience, and you'll go recommend Google to five friends. No, Google has your attention, and they're making more money now by making more from your attention. Google's dream situation is that every company realizes that if they want to sell, they have to pay Google to be part of the sponsored buying section. And I can't shake the feeling that they are trying to create this pay-to-win environment because the sponsored shopping segment is now not just a way to get a little bit of a visibility boost. It's been designed to be the only easy way for users to shop on Google. Like, for example, let's see what happens when you try and search for something with a little bit more detail. So, let's go back to chairs, but this time world's most comfortable chair. As expected, the shopping Carousel is filled with exactly the kinds of things I'm looking for: a varied selection of all very comfortable things with links to buy them. But then scroll down, and most of the search results are just articles, list-based.

articles, which is a separate very big problem that I'm getting to. So, I nearly thought for a second, Oh, this is a good result that looks like a very comfortable chair for £75. And then you scroll down, and you see, This item is available for adoption, not for sale. So, I pay just for the chair to continue to exist. Like, what? The Google doesn't even seem to care if it takes you to scam sites so many times. When I've been browsing for what furniture might go into our future home, we are recommended sites like Litfad in this sponsored carousel. Okay, so Litfad reviews Trustpilot's at the very top and warning, This company's trust score is currently unavailable due to a breach of Trustpilot's guidelines. This company has been pressuring people to change or remove their negative reviews, and even then, it's primarily one star. Okay, so Litfad is a scam. Beware of Litfad's customer service. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to see that this is a scam company. I don't see any way that

Google wouldn't know that there are companies like this that they are actively promoting, and so the only conclusion that I can draw from this is that either Google is completely overwhelmed or Google doesn't care. If someone on Google is watching this, then correct me if I'm wrong. I would love to be corrected, or at the very least, promise that you're working to fix this. But it sure looks like right now, as long as a company pays, it doesn't actually matter whether they're a scam or not. They go right to the top. I can't tell you how many times I've accidentally ended up on chatbot app or better gbt when I've been trying to search for chat gbt because they look basically the same, and they just paying to be ranked higher than chat GPT. These companies, their entire business model is basically people accidentally clicking on them. It didn't always work like this. Google, when they started out, did not use to make a lot of money, and that was on purpose. You know, there was a time when Google would

receive actual fan mail with checks and cash inside from people saying, We love your product, and you deserve to be making more money than you are. And that's because of the founders who, in their original paper presenting Google to the world, specifically said, Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm. And yet here we are in Q2 2024. Google made $847 billion in revenue, 76.3% of which came from ads, and about 75% of that ad revenue is specifically from Google search ads alone, as opposed to YouTube ads, etc. And then even for searchers where there's no product to sell and there's no company paying to sponsor it, what does Google do? Try to push their own services and their own initiatives like, How many people are there on Earth? 7951 billion H. Now don't get me wrong, if

I'm looking for a quick answer to a simple question. I appreciate how Google just goes, Here you go, but in 2024, this is not the right answer. It's actually not close to the right answer. We have 8.2 billion people, and if you click into it, you can see that it's showing us the answer provided by Google initiatives, even if the answer is way more outdated than other company sources on the internet. But okay, you probably catch my drift by this point. Google search results page is starting to look an awful lot like an old 2000's web portal, which is ironic because one of the biggest reasons that Google actually beat Yahoo to become the world's de facto library was because they specifically didn't try to be one. Well, Yahoo did because they knew they'd make more money if they kept people on their own pages as much as possible. But it's at this stage into my deep dive that I came to my second realization that while Google has fallen from grace, changed who they are, and started to put the users

experience second. It's not all Google's fault. A lot of what's been making it so hard to find the right web page these days is also down to the people making them. If you work online in any capacity, really, or you know you just have really boring friends, you'll have heard of search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO has become a massive industry, with a market size valued at $1.8 billion in 2022, projected to reach $7.1 billion in 2028. The basic idea is about analyzing the way that Google's algorithm ranks pages and then employing various tricks to make your page look as good as possible to that algorithm so that you get placed higher and therefore clicked more. And as the algorithm has changed, so have the kind of tricks you see being used. Like, for example, you used to be able to boost your visibility just by having lots of reviews associated with your business, even if those reviews are negative, which led to, for instance, a scam in which a man named Vitali Borker deliberately sent damaged or fake.

glasses to customers hoping they would be angered enough to review bomb him, knowing that it would promote his site. But nowadays, you'll see these problems instead: sites including buzzwords to capture as many possible search queries as you can think of. That's why so many AliExpress listings have incomprehensible names that are just a string of largely unrelated words. And it's why articles like recipes, which should be so simple, have to start off with paragraphs of preamble about how grandma always made the best cozy warm winter autumn cookies 2024. Yeah man, relatable people updating old articles even if they do none of the new research but literally just change the title to 2024. This happens all the time in tech. So many times I've been browsing the best X products of 2024 and I'll slowly realize as I scroll through the list that not a single one is from 2024. The website is effectively trying to scam me by recommending old products that make no sense today. They'll have erased all mentions of it being written

in 2021 or 2022, and as far as Google's rules are concerned, if an article has been edited in 2024, it's now a 2024 article. Companies, especially those with lots of ads on their pages, trying everything they can to rank really highly for searches that are totally unrelated to their brand because they know it'll get them lots of clicks and lots of revenue. Like, why does Forbes have so many articles on supplements? Well, because supplement ads pay a lot of money. But here's the kicker: the only companies who are pumping out this much content and paying to boost their visibility as much as possible are the ones with a monetary incentive to do so. And the way to do that is being flooded with affiliate links. You can see this very much in action because there are papers showing that only a small percentage of review articles actually use affiliate marketing, but the majority of the results that come up on a search do use affiliate marketing. And that means it's got to a stage now where searching for the best of basically

anything is pointless. Almost every single article is a top 10 of products not selected based on their merit, but in fact just whether or not they'll get a kickback when you buy them. How many times have you reached the number one recommended product in these lists only to find that it's clearly an imported product from China being sold for multiple times what it's worth? I can guarantee that a large slice of these articles are written with the writer not actually having bought and tested all 10 products themselves, but instead having gone onto Amazon, searched for the highest-rated products, ideally expensive ones so they can make more from the affiliate links, and spent 1 hour max compiling them into a list before spamming that list with buzzwords to try and capture as many people as possible who will actually trust this research. So why doesn't Google just fix it? Well, determining the quality of a result is actually really complicated. The best that they are able to do right now is to factor in the reaction of the users from

a Google Presentation. What's crazy is that we don't actually understand documents. Beyond some basic stuff, we hardly look at documents; we look at people. If a document gets a positive reaction, we figure it is good. If the reaction is negative, it is probably bad. Grossly simplified, this is the source of Google's Magic. So basically, what this means is if a page is ranking high and it's getting lots of clicks, and those people end up on that page for ages scrolling through the Meer of deliberately vapid text interlaced with ads to find the actual answer they came for, then the algorithm figures, Hey, they spent a long time there; that must be good, and the Vicious Cycle continues. And one thing that I find is a really unfortunate side effect of this constant arms race between Google and then these slimy growth-at-all-cost sites is that every time Google updates their algorithm to counter the new strategies, it's most of the genuinely good, worthwhile sites that don't keep up with the times and just focus on making good.

content. Those are the ones who get buried like Mom and Pop Air Purifier review site housefresh.com, who actually do test the products, unlike the top 10 listic or magazines who don't. But now we come to the final frontier because Google's success has always been to do with AI, but now they are integrating generative large language model AI in ways that are mostly making things even worse. You've probably noticed an increasing number of these AI overviews when you're searching for things coming up, and you probably also noticed they're not very accurate. They often serve you the kind of flagrantly wrong gobbledygook best described with the expression gobble-gook coined by marketing executive and search expert AJ Con, whose research was super helpful for this video. But here's the thing: let's assume that these AI popups work perfectly 100% of the time, which is obviously the goal that Google's striving towards. How does that help all the sites that have helped to first gather that info, the sites who've

done the work, research, and publishing the content that it seems like Google is using to train their AI. Answer it doesn't. As a matter of fact, it actually seems an awful lot like Google is trying to replace those sites. And on one hand, you could argue that, you know, AI summaries are amazing, and they're going to make the search experience even faster. But after doing all of this digging, I'm starting to feel a slightly different way. What's to stop Google from deciding to use its AI to eventually replace the need to visit any other website? So, you spend your entire browsing session within Google search page itself, and then the only way to get ahead of the AI, pay for it. That way, the entire time you use Google, you're paying Google in some way or another. Maybe that's not the world that Google wants to build, but it's hard to argue that they're not moving closer towards it. And this actually reminds us of something, an idea coined by Cory Doctorow called inification, which I talk about fully in

this video here, and it's effectively where online services start off by enticing users with a high-quality product. When the users are locked in, they make it worse for them to better serve their business customers. And then finally, once both sides are locked in, they start shafting all of them to maximize profits for themselves, by which point, oops, we don't have a desirable product anymore. And I think it's fair to say Google is taking some big swings into that final stage here, and it's going to sting their business customers even more than usual, considering that the very mechanism that they're using to make things harder for them, this AI that they're now having to compete against, only works by stealing their content anyway. Now, if you do want the web experience before or this ification back then, I recommend you install Surfshark VPN for a few reasons. It cleans up your browsing cookies, pop-ups, trackers. It's got a baked-in antivirus with a ton of features like webcam protection, which blocks unauthorized apps from getting access to your camera. But here's what I

think is the coolest. So, at this point, you probably know how most VPNs work. They take your traffic, they route it through one of their servers, so that all the websites on the other end can see is the details of that server. And that's already pretty good. But Surfshark uses Nexus technology, meaning that every one of their servers is connected, and that Surfshark can bounce you between all of them on the fly without dropping your connection. And that's pretty Next Level because it means you're even more difficult to track. You can have a new IP address every time you click a new link, and instead of your data being masked through one server, your data can be masked through an entire network of servers. And you will get even better speeds because as soon as a faster server option opens up, you will be routed through that instead of the one you're on automatically. And that's just part of why I use Surfshark. Drish uses Surfshark. Our entire team uses Surfshark. It is the only VPN that I

recommend to people. And if you go to Surfshark.com, boss, it's also more affordable than ever at just over $2 a month for an unlimited number of users, with four extra months for free.

Why Google Search is Falling Apart.

Let's become the Greatest Tech Community on the Planet 🌍

I'm Arun Maini, I'm a 27 year old Economics graduate whose life's passion is Technology, and I'm on a mission to make the most FUN and USEFUL Tech videos on the Planet! 🙏





Mrwhosetheboss

Google search has increasingly prioritized sponsored ads, with four ads often appearing before any organic content.

The layout of the results page has shifted, making it feel like the entire fold is now dominated by sponsored content.

Additionally, the design of sponsored links has become less distinct from organic results, making it harder for users to filter them out.

Google's Search Algorithm and Business Model

Google's search results for products are often less accurate than their sponsored recommendations, leading to a pay-to-win environment.

The company's business model prioritizes gaining users' attention and making money from advertisers, rather than helping users find the perfect product.

This has resulted in Google promoting potentially scammy companies, raising questions about their commitment to providing accurate and reliable search results.

Google's Advertising Dominance and Its Impact

Google's revenue in Q2 2024 reached $847 billion, with 76.

3% coming from ads, primarily search ads.

The company's approach to providing answers and pushing its own services has led to outdated information being presented to users.

The rise of search engine optimization (SEO) has created a $1.

8 billion industry, with its market size projected to reach $7.

1 billion by 2028, as businesses employ various tricks to rank higher in Google's algorithm.

Many websites use buzzwords and unrelated strings of words to capture search queries, leading to incomprehensible listings and articles.

This has resulted in outdated products being recommended as "best of 2024," with companies using affiliate links to boost visibility and revenue.

The overwhelming presence of affiliate marketing has made searching for the best products pointless, as many articles are driven by monetary incentives rather than genuine merit.

Google's understanding of documents is minimal, as they primarily focus on user reactions to determine a page's quality.

The constant arms race between Google and low-quality sites leads to genuinely good content being buried in search rankings.

The integration of generative AI is exacerbating the issue, as Google may be trying to replace the sites that provide the information they use to train the AI, potentially leading to a browsing experience that is entirely within Google's ecosystem.

The Impact of Online Services and Surfshark VPN

Online services often lure users with high-quality products, then worsen their offerings to maximize profits.

Google's recent actions are causing additional pain for business customers, as their AI competes by stealing content.

Surfshark VPN offers a solution with unique Nexus technology, providing seamless server rotation for better tracking protection and faster speeds, all at an affordable price.