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10 big changes with search engines over my 20 years of covering them

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Search Engine Land founding editor Danny Sullivan looks at how search has changed over the two decades he’s been writing about it.

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A study shows that Google's algorithem makes users' experiences become worse.

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Google search might be getting worse - and AI threatens to ruin it entirely

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If Google search truly has gotten worse, should we be worried?

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Ex-Google employee explains that Google is getting worse because the whole Internet is also getting worse.

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Ex-Googler Answers Why Google Search is Getting Worse

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Ex-Googler Marissa Mayer insists the problem isn’t Google search and explains it’s the web itself that’s getting worse

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Perspective | How does Google's monopoly hurt you? Try these searches.

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Compare Google search engine results over nearly two decades and a trend emerges: Results are filled with advertising and non-Google results are lower down. (Video: Brian Monroe, Jonathan Baran/The Washington Post)

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Let's Google together. Open a Web browser and search for T-shirts. I'll wait.

Is the first thing you see a search result? I'm not talking about the stuff labeled Ads or Maps. On my screen, the actual result is not in the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh or even eighth row of stuff. It's buried on row nine.
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Googling didn't used to require so much ... scrolling. On some searches, it's like Where's Waldo but for information.

Without us even realizing it, the Internet's most-used website has been getting worse. On too many queries, Google is more interested in making search lucrative than a better product for us.

There's one reason it gets away with this, according to a recent congressional investigation: Google is so darn big. An antitrust lawsuit from the U.S. Justice Department, filed Tuesday, makes a similar point.

How does Google's alleged monopoly hurt you? Today, 88 percent of all searches happen on Google, in part because contracts make it the default on computers and phones. But whether Google is actually fetching you good information can be hard to see. First, Googling is easy and free, which blinds everyone a bit. Second, we don't have a great alternative for broad Web searches - Microsoft's rival Bing doesn't have enough data to compete well. (This is the problem of monopolies in the information age.)

Help Desk: Ask our tech columnist a question

Over the last two decades, Google has made changes in drips rather than big makeovers. To see how search results have changed, what you'd need is a time machine. Good news: We have one of those!

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine stored some Google search results over the years. When we look back, a picture emerges of how Google increasingly fails us. There's more space dedicated to ads that look like search results. More results start with answer "snippets" - sometimes incorrect - ripped from other sites. And increasingly, results point you back to Google's own properties such as Maps and YouTube, where it can show more ads and gather more of your data.

There are lots of times Google is still darn useful. I believe the company when it says it makes over 3,000 improvements every year, such as searching with your camera or just humming to find a song. But it's also true that Google can bury better results when doing so helps it make money or prioritize another Google service. It can act like a bad personal shopper who organizes your wardrobe by whatever T-shirts earn the highest commission.

Google disputes my review. "Comparing the experience you get with Google today to the quality of Google in 1999 is like comparing high speed WiFi to dial-up Internet," emailed spokeswoman Lara Levin. She said it's incorrect to define results as unpaid "blue links" to other websites. "What has changed is how we organize the information, in a way that's more modern and that hundreds of thousands of tests each year tell us that people find useful."

Members of Congress, regulators and legal experts will battle in the weeks ahead over the nuances of antitrust law. Fortunately, to see for yourself how Google puts profits over people, all you have to do is join me on three eye-opening searches.

Search 1: "T-shirts"

Google is, quite literally, a bad personal shopper. Here, side by side, are Google results for T-shirts from the Wayback Machine in 2000 and 2013 alongside what I see in 2020.

We all know Google has ads. But back when Google first won us over, it had fewer ads, and they were generally marked with a colorful background. Today, my T-shirts result is buried under four ads, as well as nine shopping ad results over on the right side. There's also a giant map with links - we'll talk about the proliferation of this kind of stuff in a moment. (After I published this column, the results for this query began to no longer include text-based ads at the top. Google spokeswoman Suzanne Blackburn said the company didn't change anything, though "many factors beyond Google's control influence how many top ads users see.")

Relative to 2000, today you have to scroll six times as far down the page to get to the first real, unpaid link to an outside website.

T-shirts aren't the only search that requires excessive scrolling. Cognitive psychologist Pete Meyers, who analyzes Google results for marketing company Moz, studied 10,000 different searches to see how far down the page blue-link search results land. In 2013, the average real search result link began at 375 pixels down the page. In 2020, it had dropped down to 616 pixels because of ads and all the other info Google puts on top of its "organic" links to other sites.

The reality is, whatever's on top is most likely to be the business that thrives - and that business will have to pass along to us, its customers, the cost of the Google ads that put it on top.

It's true that back in 2000, Google's actual search results for T-shirts weren't as good - CDNow and even Apple (the computer company) were among the sites that made it to the top five. But remember: Shopping-related searches were less common in 2000. And that doesn't excuse Google making it so hard to get to its actual results today.

With a time machine, we can also see how Google keeps making ads harder to spot. Ginny Marvin, editor of the trade publication Search Engine Land, has been keeping tabs for years over what she calls the "blurring of ads and organic listings." According to her archive, first ads had color backgrounds and a labels, then they shifted to white with color labels. Google did remove text-based ads on the right side of results in 2016. But today, Google places up to four ads on top of desktop Web searches, using a small black "Ad" label that disappears in the context of a busy page.

" Squint or you'll click it," is how Silicon Valley publication TechCrunch described Google's latest labeling shift, earlier this year, which removed a green box around the word Ad and shifted it up.

Levin said Google changed the design "to avoid clutter" and that in its own studies, people were better able to distinguish ads and results with the new design.

Believe it or not, Google also thinks we don't mind the ads - and that they're actually useful. Said Levin: "We have an incentive to only show ads when it's valuable to people." She didn't answer when I asked what percent of queries now have ads, and what percent of the search results they take up.

Good luck if you just wanted to search for the most popular T-shirts. Google is working harder to make sure it gets paid for whatever T-shirt you might eventually buy.

Search 2: "question one nevada"

This search result, you won't actually find now, because it was so egregious Google fixed it in September.

Question One is an initiative on the November ballot that would change how Nevada manages higher education. A few weeks ago Elliot Anderson, a former state lawmaker who helped get Question One on the ballot, noticed that Googling "question one Nevada" generated a box at the top of the results that began: "Vote 'no' on Question 1."

How on earth did Google results end up telling people how to vote?

Google has been shifting away from what co-founder Larry Page said was its mission back when it went public in 2004: "to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible." Now, instead of providing ten blue links to sources of information, Google wants to give what it calls direct answers, which it says are more convenient.

This information often comes in the form of " featured snippets," which are chosen by its software and borrowed from sources it thinks are authoritative.

Sometimes when you search, you do just want an answer - especially when you're using a smart speaker. But who died and made Google the ultimate arbiter of knowledge? Google doesn't always snip correctly, like with Question One. "The information was accurate and came from an official website, but the snippeted portion of the page only represented one side of a civic topic, so we took action under our relevant policy to remove that snippet," said Levin.

(Anderson, for one, said he flagged the error repeatedly using the "feedback" link on the page, and heard nothing. Google fixed it after it was flagged to a Google employee on Twitter.)

Goodbye, Chrome: Google's Web browser has become spy software

It's not hard to find other examples where Google snips strangely or borrows from not-so-authoritative sources. Search for " How do I check my Krispy Kreme Gift Card balance," and you get information from a site selling gift cards, rather than Krispy Kreme's own site, which has the real answer and a useful link.

Other direct answers that just point you back to Google are also pushing the normal blue-link results down the page. These days, search results can also start with YouTube videos, other suggested searches - or, in cases like our earlier T-shirts search, a big Google Map.

A recent study by investigative nonprofit The Markup found that of 15,000 recent popular queries, Google devoted 41 percent of the first page of mobile search results to Google itself, including its own sites and direct answers. (Levin told The Markup that its study was built on a "nonrepresentative sample of searches.")

There are times I find a Google Map or YouTube video at the top of a search to be helpful. The problem is, Google also has a financial motivation to keep us from clicking away to other sources. As The Markup pointed out, Google makes five times as much revenue from ads on its own properties as it does on ads it places elsewhere.

Search 3: "pediatricians arlington va"

Google's conflict of interest can lead us to make bad choices. When you search for pediatricians, Google tops the results with a big Google Map.

On my map, Google calls out three doctors' offices. Are these the best, or most popular ones in the area? Look closer: Two of them get a sub-4-star rating and have fewer than 20 reviews.

If I scroll down the Google results page and click on reviews site Zocdoc, I find listings for a lot more pediatricians, some of whom have more than 200 reviews - and much higher ratings. Online reviews on any site can sometimes be fake, but why is Google always putting its own first?

Searching for a doctor is a higher-stakes version of a problem that afflicts Google searches for flights, translations, restaurants and other local information. Even our T-shirts search popped up a Google Map with listings for local stores (where I couldn't actually buy T-shirts online) ahead of links to other websites.

The technical term for this is search "preferencing." How well would Google's mediocre doctor reviews do in search results where Google doesn't have its thumb on the scale?

Google says people make more than 20 million contributions per day to its Maps reviews. I left one last year after my dentist's office begged me to do so, in the hopes it would finally show up in Google search.

It's the middle of the night. Do you know who your iPhone is talking to?

Levin said Google results are "designed to return the most relevant and helpful results for a given query across many dimensions. Assuming that a site with more reviews or listings is automatically better is a flawed premise."

Congress said Google's practice is dangerous, writing on page 188 of its report that it has "the effect of privileging Google's own inferior services while demoting competitors' offerings."

Google's ability to push its own products has quietly reshaped swaths of the economy. As my colleague Rachel Lerman recently wrote, since launching Google Flights and Google Hotels nearly a decade ago, Google has come to command the online travel market. Never mind that Google's travel search, like its listings for pediatricians, isn't considered tops: It didn't even make Frommer's 2020 list of the best airfare search sites.

That's how monopolies extract their price. Google is playing fast and loose with the whole idea of search engine, making sure the simplest and easiest-to-access results are either paid ads or information that keeps you on Google. Either way, Google wins - and, more often than we realize, we lose.
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Perspective | How does Google's monopoly hurt you? Try these searches.

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Right under our noses, the Internet's most-used website has been getting worse.

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People worries that Google puts ads above the users.

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The Department of Justice and Google just rumbled their way past the halfway point of a landmark antitrust trial vying to answer a potentially industry-rupturing question: Does Google maintain its ironfisted stranglehold over internet search results because of its superior innovation or as a byproduct of ruthless anti-competitive jockeying and closed-door dealings? New documents revealed during the historic monopoly trial over the past week seem to lend more weight to the latter argument, and they could help explain why Google's once dazzling search results anecdotally feel like they are getting worse for some.

It's no secret that Google dominates search-the tech behemoth reportedly commands around 83% of the global search market share. Google has repeatedly defended that oddly uneven pie chart-both during the current trial and years before-by arguing its search product is simply superior to alternatives. Consumers, the argument goes, continuously choose Google due to its constant innovation and ease of use. Google does happen to be the default search engine on billions of devices, but grumpy customers can simply switch their default setting with a quick click (eh, okay well maybe more like 15 clicks) of a button.

But documents and testimony revealed by the Department of Justice this week complicate that already imperfect narrative. Lawyers for the government on Monday displayed a series of 2019 emails between then head of Google search Ben Gomes and colleagues where the executive expressed fears his team was "getting too involved with ads for the good of the product and company." In later emails, Gomes said he was worried his team was "getting too close to the money."

Those comments are important because, as Bloomberg points out, Google was known for erecting clear barriers distancing the product side of search from the advertising wing so that the former can focus on constantly improving user experience. But the documents presented at trial appear to show Gomes expressing concern that the company could be putting its advertising revenue profits ahead of consumer regard. Specifically, the documents point to a "Code Yellow" issued at the company for seven weeks following concerns it might fall short of its search revenue goals for the first quarter of 2019. Gomes, according to the documents, felt like he and others on the product side were tasked with focusing too much on revenue solutions.

"I think it is good for us to aspire to query growth and to aspire to more users," Gomes wrote in an email to colleagues seen by reporters at the trial. "But I think we are getting too involved with ads for the good of the product and company."

Prioritizing growth over quality?

Gomes reportedly sparred with Google over its decision to set its metrics on the total number of user queries. The former head of search reportedly balked at this metric because an improved search functionality should ideally prioritize answering users' questions with as few clicks as possible. Google, the DOJ argued, benefits from users taking longer to search because the company can run ads against each of those queries. Around 80% of Google revenues reportedly come from advertising. If a user needs to refine their search a few times to get what they're looking for, or if they have to scroll deeper through the results, more ads can be served to them.

An over-focus on driving up queries, Gomes warned, could hypothetically incentivize the company to worsen the product by disabling necessary features like spell correction or ranking improvement. Those extra queries could come at the end user's expense. Gomes, during his testimony this week, said he did not think Google would actually go as far as to stoop to turning off spell correction.

"Most headcount (non assistant) for search has gone into projects that are growth oriented," Gomes wrote in a draft email intended for then Google Head of Advertising Prabhakar Raghavan. "To the point, I worry that we are really not investing in research or speculation adequately."

Gomes never ended up sending the email. Instead, he reportedly met with Raghavan and the two agreed to replace queries with a new metric measuring "groups of queries." Still, the exchange highlights the inherent tensions that can arise between the product and advertising teams and their at times conflicting goals.

'Hallmark sign of monopoly power'

A legal expert and antitrust advocate speaking with Gizmodo said these questions speak to the heart of the government's case against Google. In an interview, American Economic Liberties Project Legal Counsel Lee Hepner said Google's ability to potentially degrade a product without meaningfully losing users was a "hallmark sign of monopoly power." Hepner likened this to more traditional anti-competition cases where monopolists can simply raise the prices of goods without improving their quality and, importantly, without any real threat of losing market share.

"It's proof of Google's monopoly over search that they are able to degrade their experience," Hepner said. "Google is aware that degrading its search product is going to affect the user experience negatively."

Tech Oversight Project Executive Director Kyle Morse echoed that sentiment, describing Search as the "linchpin of [Google's] entire business model."

"When people use Google search to plan a vacation or find a new restaurant, they think they're getting the best results out there, but in reality, Google has degraded its search product in order to squeeze money from advertisers and ultimately consumers," Morse added.

Google strongly pushed back against those criticisms in an email sent to Gizmodo.

"The organic results you see in Search are not affected by our ads systems or by the ads we show for a query," a Google spokesperson said.

Aside from Gomes' testimony, the DOJ released 22 new exhibits on Monday that, in various ways, show the lengths the company allegedly went to in order to maintain its search marketplace dominance. Google, according to testimony from the trial last week, dished out $26.3 billion in 2021 to become the default search engine across numerous browsers and mobile devices. A large chunk of that spending is believed to have gone to Apple to ensure Google is the default search engine on the iPhone.

Google's power as the default search engine on a plethora of devices grinds against its argument that users simply chose them over competitors because they create a superior product. Internal Google documents released by the DOJ this week speak to that point as well. In one slide, a Google presenter admitted "users do not seem to make an active choice of a SE [search engine]." Elsewhere, an internal Google deck showed Google searches dropping 27% after Google was "unset" from the homepage.

Google's relationship with Apple is particularly significant given its unilateral access to iPhone customers. Internal Google notes of a meeting between Sundar Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook released Monday by the DOJ give an interesting insight into that relationship. The meeting, which began as a discussion of the regulatory environment in D.C. eventually turned toward the question of Google's place as the default search engine on Apple products.

Cook, according to the notes, told Pichai he believes the two companies were "deep partners; deeply connected where our services end and yours begin." In another note from the meeting, Pichai reportedly said, "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company." Pichai tried to distance himself from that line during this testimony on Monday.

"I don't recall myself saying that line," Pichai said during the trial, according to Fortune. At the same time, 2019 emails authored by Pichai appear to show the Google CEO concerned members of the company's search team leaving for Apple or other potential rivals.

"I need monthly reports of all losses to key competitors on an ongoing basis and if anyone from search to Apple, please email me directly on every individual case." Pichai wrote according to the recently released documents.

Other documents dating back to 2005 show Google emphatically pushing back against Microsoft's decision to build search into its toolbar for the release of its Internet Explorer 7 web browser. In a letter sent to Microsoft at the time, Google argued it would be too difficult for users to find the setting to change the default search engine. These are remarkably similar to the arguments DuckDuckGo and other smaller search engines currently make against Google today. The emails to Microsoft even described them as maintaining "monopoly" products.

"We are deeply concerned about the potential for harm to the competitive process from Microsoft's actions, particularly given Microsoft's monopoly position with its Windows OS and its IE browser," Google wrote at the time.

"By pushing out an update of IE with a new search box that will default to Microsoft's own search engine in the vast majority of cases, Microsoft would gain a large number of search users for reasons having nothing to do with the merits of Microsoft's search offerings," Google added.

Judge reverses course on siloing evidence from public

These documents and others like them are part of a growing list of files pertaining to the antitrust trial posted on the DOJ's website. Government lawyers, as well as speech advocates and members of the press, have needed to push Judge Amit Mehta, who's presiding over the case, to actually let these documents see the light of day.

For the first few weeks of the trial, Mehta barred both the DOJ and Google from sharing much of any of the documents shared during the trial, which itself is already highly restrictive. The result: a history-defining antitrust trial largely relegated to the shadowy recesses of newspaper back pages and industry publications. Diane Rulke, an organizational behavior professor at Carnegie Mellon recently told the New York Times she believed the public's lack of access to relevant information was "unprecedented in antitrust trials."

Critics of Google's business practices, like Hepner of the AELP, said the release of these documents can make the case against the tech giant all the more clear

"Over and over again we are seeing that Google is hyper-aware of the negative effects of their monopoly," Hepner said. "That more than anything is the most compelling evidence coming out of this case.

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New Google Trial Docs May Explain Why Search Sucks So Bad Now

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New documents in the Google antitrust trial show how tension between product and advertising teams could lead to degraded experiences for consumers.

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How users feel when they use Google to search for some advice or references

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Fuchs, Christian. “The Google and Facebook Online Advertising Duopoly.” The Online Advertising Tax as the Foundation of a Public Service Internet: A CAMRI Extended Policy Report, University of Westminster Press, 2018, pp. 11–19. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv5vddk0.5. Accessed 7 Feb. 2024.

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3. The Google and Facebook Online Advertising Duopoly from The Online Advertising Tax as the Foundation of a Public Service Internet: A CAMRI Extended Policy Report on JSTOR

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The Google and Facebook Online Advertising Duopoly, The Online Advertising Tax as the Foundation of a Public Service Internet, pp. 11-19

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Masoni, Marco, et al. “Google Needs Better Control of Its Advertisements.” BMJ: British Medical Journal, vol. 338, no. 7696, 2009, pp. 718–718. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20512434. Accessed 7 Feb. 2024.

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Google Needs Better Control of Its Advertisements on JSTOR

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Marco Masoni, Maria Renza Guelfi, Gian Franco Gensini, Google Needs Better Control of Its Advertisements, BMJ: British Medical Journal, Vol. 338, No. 7696 (Mar. 21, 2009), p. 718

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From X(Twitter), @egavactip. Google was a library, but it is getting worse for now.

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Google keeps making things worse for researchers. Now it's getting rid of cached pages.  Google was a lot more useful to me as a researcher a decade or so ago than now.

https://t.co/qeWOnWoJgo

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Google will no longer back up the Internet: Cached webpages are dead

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Google Search will no longer make site backups while crawling the web.

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Google keeps making things worse for researchers. Now it's getting rid of cached pages.  Google was a lot more useful to me as a researcher a decade or so ago than now.

https://t.co/qeWOnWoJgo

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Google keeps making things worse for researchers. Now it's getting rid of cached pages. Google was a lot more useful to me as a researcher a decade or so ago than now.https://t.co/qeWOnWoJgo
— Mark Pitcavage (@egavactip) February 3, 2024

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Google will no longer back up the Internet: Cached webpages are dead

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.entities.urls[].description
Google Search will no longer make site backups while crawling the web.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
Google keeps making things worse for researchers. Now it's getting rid of cached pages.  Google was a lot more useful to me as a researcher a decade or so ago than now.

https://t.co/qeWOnWoJgo

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Google keeps making things worse for researchers. Now it's getting rid of cached pages.  Google was a lot more useful to me as a researcher a decade or so ago than now.

https://t.co/qeWOnWoJgo

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
Google keeps making things worse for researchers. Now it's getting rid of cached pages.  Google was a lot more useful to me as a researcher a decade or so ago than now.

https://t.co/qeWOnWoJgo

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.entities.urls[].title
Google will no longer back up the Internet: Cached webpages are dead

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.entities.urls[].description
Google Search will no longer make site backups while crawling the web.