Where did Google get so lost?

Google is pretty broken. Think back to what a Google search was like 10-15 years ago – you’d get back really strong, highly relevant page 1 organic search results answering concisely, and exactly the question you’d asked. You’d basically get the information you’ve asked for.

Run the same search today and instead you get a page with a generic AI answer, with ads front and center, and actual organic search results way below the fold, if they even appear on page 1 at all. Clicking through to those organic results, 99% of the time you’ll reach a page that’s hugely generic, with lots of information you aren’t looking for. And while it might answer your question, it will be buried somewhere in middle of a pretty long article making it pretty hard to find.

In the early days Google used to pride itself in being the best and most accurate search engine, and people loved it because it just worked, and it answered the questions people were asking. But today, Google search isn’t a useful tool anymore, it’s just an advertising platform that has driven widespread change across the internet that’s eventually lead to where we are now – delivering an internet of generic, duplicated, largely useless information where bigger ad profit is the only driving factor.

So where did Google get so lost? Well that’s what we’re talking about in today’s post.

My names Jon Hussey and I'm the founder of Developer Connection, the marketplace for professional connections between eCommerce stores and developers across the UK.

The topic I’m talking about today is something I’ve actually been wanting to cover for a while, and having been involved in web development and optimising content for better SEO since the 90’s I’ve seen the journey I’m talking about first hand.

Today, Google has really backed itself into a corner, and is I think actually in quite a bit of trouble when considering their future in search. This is to such an extent that the search market is in place where if another company comes along with a better concept that works and really gives people better answers to the questions they’re asking, they could take the search crown from Google. And in case you’re thinking, we’ll that’s already happened with AI, then no that concept isn’t going to be AI, and you’ll understand why that is as I say more.

The change here needs to be much more widespread than just a new tool that better understands the data we already have out there. It needs to be something that takes us backwards in terms of getting better quality search results, but is also able to cope with the ever increasing number of sites, and wealth of information that’s out there.

So to better understand all this, we need to look back at the history of search and major changes Google have introduced over the years that have had a big impact on how people create content on their sites.

Let first go back to the early days, 1998, and the introduction PageRank. This was where we first saw the introduction of backlinks as a ranking factor. Back then it was a very different time and a very different internet. In those days there was a fraction of the content there is now, and tactics like paying for backlinks from higher profile sites to boost your domains authority, and therefore search engine ranking didn’t exist. The information and linking that was out there was just much more genuine.

Going to the early 2000’s and the Florida update, Google started to penalise sites for having low quality content and spammy links.

Mid 2000’s, 2005 and the Jagger update, bad, and low quality link building techniques started to be penalised.

2011 and the Panda update, Google started to downrank sites with low quality, and thin content.

Then in 2012 and the Penguin update was introduced to penalise black hat SEO tactics like keyword stuffing and suspicious link building.

The next update is the big one, and the start of where things really started to go wrong for Google. It can be argued that up until this point, in 2012, the changes Google introduced did actually drive better content on the internet. The changes up until now were really focused on removing results where people had attempted to get to the top of search results using underhand tactics, as opposed to providing actual genuinely useful information people wanted to find.

And it worked, this was really the golden age for Google when everyone loved it as a search engine, the number of ads were minimal and pretty discreet at the top of the page, and search results actually led to pages that gave people the information they wanted.

Google’s tactic to this point was essentially just to keep moving the goal posts forward as they understood more about how people created content, and tried to manipulate search results to get to the top of rankings when they shouldn’t really be there.

The next change they made, did the same thing, it moved the goal posts again, but probably even Google couldn’t have foreseen what impact the change would have had long term on the internet as a whole.

In 2013 Google introduced the Hummingbird update. This update was designed to shift the focus away from primarily using keywords as the main ranking factor to instead introducing the need to have more comprehensive and authoritative content on and around the subject people were searching for.

This is where we saw the emergence of the concept of topical authority.

And it’s because of this that in the last 10 years, we’ve seen a gradual shift away from the specific, useful search results we used to get, to the current world of largely generic, limited use search results we see today.

The problem here is because Google is such a big name in search, introducing major changes means that businesses are then in turn going to make whatever changes they need to in order to continue to rank well in results. So it’s not the fault of the businesses who are forced to keep up with Google’s updates, it’s down Google themselves, and with the Hummingbird update, though they probably couldn’t see it at the time they really did back themselves into a corner.

To explain why, let me briefly cover what topical authority actually is. So before topical authority, ranking was primarily decided by keywords on the page and backlinks. But after, Google then started to say, well actually now you need to tell us that you not only know about what this person has searched for, but also about all the surrounding topics in that particular area of interest. So as an example that’s relevant for Developer Connection, say someone searches for ‘where can I find a high quality Magento developer’. I might have the best, most complete, most relevant landing page in the world, but unless Google sees that I also have lots of other information about every topic you can think of around Magento and Magento development, for instance what does a high-quality Magento developer look like, how much might it cost, what can a Magento developer do, and countless other topics, then Google probably isn’t going to to rank the page I’d like to see in search results very well at all.

So you can probably quickly imagine what happened when Google introduced this change in 2013, and what’s continuing to happen to this day. Businesses started to generate content, and generated a lot of content. The problem is that businesses often succeed because they’ve found a niche that’s in demand within a particular area of interest, and they’ve catered to the customers within that niche. But topical authority tells businesses that you can’t just be an expert in this particular area that you know a lot about, you’ve also got to demonstrate that you know a lot about the wider subject in general if you want to rank well in Google.

On the surface this sounds like a beneficial update, allowing Google to make informed decisions on how to rank pages based on a wider subject matter. And at first this will have been how it worked, and very likely would have increased the quality of search results.

But over time the opposite has happened and the quality of search results has really suffered, and here’s why. So you run a successful business, but one that depends pretty heavily on SEO and traffic from Google. Google introduces this new update that says you need to work towards topical authority to carry on ranking in search results. So of course, you start generating content to demonstrate topical authority in your area of expertise. The problem is that everyone else is doing exactly the same thing. Because of this you decide that you need to throw the net a bit wider in terms of the topics of interest you cover. But again everyone is doing the same thing. So you widen the net again and so it continues.

But the more topics you cover, the more generic, less useful, and less business specific that information becomes, until you get to the point that most of the information on your site is no longer specific enough for people to actually understand what it is you do and how you cater for their need. And this means that when one of your pages does appear in search results, it could be so generic as to not actually cater for what people are looking for, or look like an attractive page for them.

So, imagine this happening across the entire internet, and you can quickly understand how topical authority has driven search results that are generic, non specific, often useless, and just no longer connect with people in the way they used to.

But you might say, surely the improved ability AI gives us to parse and search through information is the solution we already have isn’t it? Well, yes AI does us a better way to look at the information that’s out there, but it just doesn’t help here when you consider the data set that these AI models are trained on. And that’s exactly the point – they’re trained on what’s already out there, that mass of generic, largely pointless, non specific data.

And you can test this yourself using Gemini, ChatGPT or anything else you like. Try asking a pretty generic question in your area of expertise. You’ll probably find that you get a pretty sensible response back that makes sense. But, when you start asking questions that are a lot more specific and require a decent level of knowledge in the subject area, the AI model will quickly fall over and give a response that just isn’t close to right. The worst thing is, it will probably make something up entirely which will then be presented as absolutely correct, and a fact. And why does this happen? Well, it’s just a reflection of the data set the AI models are trained on, and in turn a reflection of the information that’s available.

Ok, so what about backlinks, doesn’t that solve it? Again unfortunately not, because you’re only ever getting links from sites that have exactly the same issue around topical authority that you do. Yes you might be ranked higher in results, but it doesn’t solve the issue of the information actually being specific enough to connect with people who are interested in what you do.

In that case the question becomes, where do we go from here? Well, the internet is becoming more and more generic because of topical authority, those sites that already rank well in results continue to because they are getting the traffic and therefore money to carry on boosting SEO.

The reality is that right now there is no room for the little guy, it’s all about what you can afford for spend on SEO and marketing rather than the actual quality of content or what you offer.

But the irony is that ranking these smaller businesses higher in search results that don’t have that kind of budget could just solve the problem. These are the kind of businesses that are probably going to have the better, more relevant, specific content like we used to see years ago in search results, and could well be the key to improving search results again. So If that did happen, and it became the norm for the quality content to rank well regardless of topical authority, then that could actually undo a lot of the damage done by topical authority.

Then we’d get back to a place where it wasn’t just those companies with the biggest budget who always win the Google ranking game, instead it would be those businesses who genuinely offer customers something that’s in demand getting a decent share of the traffic.

It’s not a perfect solution and I’m sure someone else can come up with something better, but what I do know is that Google needs to shift away from the current model of those with the biggest budget winning to something that actually provides a better service to people searching.

The reality is, it’s either that, or Google will have to watch the gradual decline of their search business, and probably another company bid for the crown as people tire of the increasingly generic, mostly useless information Google regularly delivers.

Maybe google don’t care. They might be thinking, just let our customers decide, they know there own content, they know the right keywords to target, so lets make ads take up more of the page and be more prominent, we make more profit, and the advertisers take care of serving the specific and relevant content to searchers for us. As far as Google is concerned that’s a big win for them. But it’s the lazy way of dealing with the problem, and it can’t last forever. Or maybe, they just don’t know how to deal with the problem, and more prominent ads is the solution for them.

However you look at it, Google need to take action if they want to take search out of this slow decline. In business, if you’re standing still, you might as well be going backwards, and right now Google are definitely standing still.