Google 검색의 쇠퇴 광고, SEO 및 사용자 경험 문제

### Google 검색의 쇠퇴 광고, AI, 사용자 경험
* 📉 Google 검색이 크게 악화되어 **오가닉 콘텐츠 앞에 압도적으로 많은 광고**가 표시되어 검색 환경이 답답하고 침범적인 느낌을 줍니다.
* 📰 스크롤하지 않고도 필수 정보를 볼 수 있어야 하는 '더폴드' 개념이 스폰서 콘텐츠에 의해 지배되고 있다는 것은 **구글이 사용자 유치에 안주**하고 있다는 것을 의미합니다.
* 🔍 빠르고 정확한 검색 결과를 제공하는 선구자였던 Google은 이제 **사용자 만족도보다 광고 수익을 우선시**하여 자연 검색 결과가 종종 기대에 미치지 못하는 검색 환경을 조성하고 있습니다.
* 🛒 쇼핑 검색은 **2021년 이후 제품 목록이 검색 결과 페이지에서 차지하는 공간이 34% 더 많아지고** 오가닉 검색 결과가 특정 사용자의 요구를 충족시키지 못하는 경우가 많아지면서 사용자를 유료 광고로 유도하려는 의도적인 전략을 시사하는 등 뚜렷한 변화를 보이고 있습니다.
* 💰 2024년 2분기 매출 8,470억 달러 중 **76.3%가 광고, 주로 검색 광고에서 발생**했다는 사실에서 알 수 있듯이 Google의 수익 모델은 사용자 만족도보다는 관심을 기반으로 성장합니다.
* 🤖 검색 결과에 AI가 통합되면서 이러한 AI가 생성한 개요는 종종 **정확성이 부족**하고 사용자가 의존하는 원본 콘텐츠 소스를 대체할 위험이 있기 때문에 환경이 더욱 복잡해졌습니다.
* ⚠ 이러한 변화는 서비스가 처음에는 고품질의 제품을 제공하지만 나중에는 수익을 극대화하기 위해 사용자 경험을 타협하는 **'통합화'라는 광범위한 추세**를 반영하며, 신뢰할 수 있는 검색 엔진으로서 **Google의 미래에 대한 우려**를 불러일으킵니다.
* 🔒 더 나은 웹 경험을 되찾으려면 **추적을 최소화하고 연결 속도를 개선**하여 개인 정보 보호 및 브라우징 품질을 향상시키는 **Surfshark VPN과 같은 도구**를 고려하는 것이 좋습니다.

Google 검색이 크게 악화되어 실제 콘텐츠보다 광고가 우선시되고 사용자 경험이 저하되었습니다.

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 검색은 점점 더 스폰서 광고에 우선순위를 두고 있으며, 자연스러운 콘텐츠보다 4개의 광고가 먼저 표시되는 경우가 많습니다.

결과 페이지의 레이아웃이 변경되어 이제 전체가 스폰서 콘텐츠에 의해 지배되는 것처럼 느껴집니다.

또한 스폰서 링크의 디자인이 자연 검색 결과와 덜 뚜렷해져 사용자가 이를 걸러내기가 더 어려워졌습니다.

Google의 검색 알고리즘 및 비즈니스 모델

Google의 제품 검색 결과는 스폰서 추천보다 정확도가 떨어지는 경우가 많아 유료화 환경으로 이어집니다.

Google의 비즈니스 모델은 사용자가 완벽한 제품을 찾도록 돕기보다는 사용자의 관심을 끌고 광고주로부터 수익을 창출하는 데 우선순위를 두고 있습니다.

이로 인해 Google은 잠재적으로 사기 가능성이 있는 업체를 홍보하는 결과를 낳았으며, 정확하고 신뢰할 수 있는 검색 결과를 제공하겠다는 약속에 대한 의문이 제기되었습니다.

구글의 광고 지배력과 그 영향력

2024년 2분기 Google의 매출은 8,470억 달러에 달했으며, 이 중 76.

3%가 광고, 주로 검색 광고에서 발생했습니다.

답변을 제공하고 자체 서비스를 밀어붙이는 Google의 접근 방식은 사용자에게 오래된 정보를 제공하는 결과를 초래했습니다.

검색 엔진 최적화(SEO)가 부상하면서 18억 달러 규모의 산업이 형성되었으며, 2028년까지 시장 규모가 71억 달러에 달할 것으로 예상되는 가운데 기업들이 Google의 알고리즘에서 더 높은 순위를 차지하기 위해 다양한 트릭을 사용하면서 검색 엔진 최적화 산업이 성장하고 있습니다.

많은 웹사이트가 검색어를 캡처하기 위해 유행어와 관련 없는 단어 문자열을 사용하여 이해할 수 없는 목록과 기사를 작성합니다.

이로 인해 오래된 제품이 '2024년 최고의 제품'으로 추천되고, 기업들은 가시성과 수익을 높이기 위해 제휴 링크를 사용하기도 합니다.

제휴 마케팅의 압도적인 존재로 인해 많은 기사가 진정한 장점보다는 금전적 인센티브에 의해 주도되기 때문에 최고의 제품을 검색하는 것이 무의미해졌습니다.

구글의 알고리즘과 AI의 영향력

Google은 주로 사용자 반응에 초점을 맞춰 페이지의 품질을 결정하기 때문에 문서에 대한 이해도가 낮습니다.

Google과 품질이 낮은 사이트 간의 끊임없는 경쟁으로 인해 진정으로 좋은 콘텐츠가 검색 순위에서 묻히고 있습니다.

생성형 AI의 통합은 이 문제를 더욱 악화시키고 있는데, Google이 AI를 학습시키는 데 사용하는 정보를 제공하는 사이트를 대체하려고 시도할 수 있기 때문에 잠재적으로 Google의 생태계 내에서만 검색 환경을 제공하게 될 가능성이 있습니다.

온라인 서비스와 Surfshark VPN의 영향

온라인 서비스는 종종 고품질의 제품으로 사용자를 유인한 다음 수익을 극대화하기 위해 서비스를 악화시키는 경우가 많습니다.

최근 구글의 행동은 AI가 콘텐츠를 도용하여 경쟁하기 때문에 기업 고객들에게 추가적인 고통을 안겨주고 있습니다.

Surfshark VPN은 고유한 Nexus 기술이 적용된 솔루션을 제공하여 더 나은 추적 보호와 빠른 속도를 위한 원활한 서버 로테이션을 합리적인 가격에 제공합니다.