“If a GoTo user looks for ‘New York Yankees,’ the first 10 choices are paid advertisers (‘Buy Yankees gear at Fogdog Sports’). On the 11th try you finally get Yankees.com, the official site of the world champs. (On Google, this comes up first.)”
So...we're back to 1999 when the first 10 choices are paid ads?
Why should yankees.com be the first link? The visitor is interested in the baseball team, not necessarily their website. Google shows me a dashboard about the team with games, players, standings, recent results, upcoming games, etc. You can argue that Google hijack the traffic that websites would get otherwise, but I may get more relevant information as end user.
There are no ads on the results I see for "New York Yankees" on Google right now.
Also there is a HUGE difference in ad quality between the old pay for placement guys and Google. On Google, your ad has to be relevant and will be downranked into oblivion if nobody clicks on it. On Overture and the rest of them, that was not the case, they just auctioned off the results without regard to whether any of it was relevant. I know some of you refuse to believe this, but Google search ads are themselves a corpus of documents that are responsive to the user's search term.
The root of Google's malaise is that the web is dying. If I go to yankees.com, I get a 403. The Yankee's official site is now mlb.com/yankees, i.e. they've signed on to the generic Major League Baseball portal and just have a stock database record there. Likely they did this because the cost to run an independent website has ballooned, with all the abuse prevention and detection, anti-spam, hacking & cybersecurity, people who are trying to do something illegal and use your website as a conduit for it, legal regulations, DDoS prevention, etc. stuff you have to do.
FWIW, this site is down about 2-3 screenfuls in Google, well below the fold, so Google isn't blameless here. The results above it are a sports onebox, news universal, and Twitter highlights, though, all about the Yankees/Phillies game tonight, so arguably they are showing what users actually are most likely to want to see.
yankees.com redirects to mlb.com/yankees and this has been the case for decades. All of the clubs have their sites managed by the League. All of the owners went in on MLBAM (MLB Advanced Media) in the 2000s to centralize the tech league wide. MLBAM became BAMTech which then sold to Disney to became Disney+. The league still has a whole tech team to maintaining not only the majors but minor league teams too.
Google is charging money on other people's brands.
This wouldn't be a problem if there were ten popular search engines, or if portals were still popular and there were ten popular portals.
But what Google has done is gross monopolistic misconduct.
They've "removed the URL bar" and turned it into a search bar. They've put their browser on all devices and made it the default. They've made Google search the default. They've destroyed the ad blocker.
Now, when I search for a brand, I see an ad that looks like an official result in first place.
iPhone -> paid ad
Nike -> paid ad
Midjourney -> paid ad
These are companies' hard earned brands, and yet Google is collecting rent on them.
Google is taxing the entire internet. This ought to be illegal.
Google is not the internet and this behavior is not exclusive to Google. For example TikTok does the same thing. They have search ads when you search for brands on their platform. The TikTok app never had a url bar, TikTok provides search for TikTok, and it never had an ad blocker. Same thing for Amazon, same thing for X, etc.
You don't search TikTok to buy something from BestBuy.com
You use Chrome and Google, and both are interfering with that process. They're sticking themselves in the middle of that transaction and neither you nor Best Buy want them there.
Why not? I guarantee you people search "bestbuy tv" or "bestbuy keyboard" on TikTok. Also don't forget about the BestBuy app, there's an option for consumers to directly visit them without doing so through another app.
I think in general it's the wrong conclusion to draw that Google won because they had a simpler layout. That would have been an incredibly flimsy moat. They won because the had much better search results.
Their competitors gambled that the portal-aspect provided additional value that compensated for their shitty search results. It did not. That's also largely why they didn't adopt's Google's minimalist style. If they had adopted a similar design to Google it would have really been an apples to apples comparison, which would not have been flattering.
Funny as they always seem to forget the hardware side of search engines. Google was incredibly fast compared to its competitors because they were among the first to store their whole index in RAM rather than on hard drives. They were among the first to install huge data center with computer blades that could be changed in an instant in case of failure. As an early user, I was on board as early as 99, I was amazed by the response speed of Google and its bare style quite dépouillé.
I was in SF at the time, and remember Ask Jeeves, Inktomi, Alta Vista, Yahoo, etc.
Google's attraction at the time was not necessarily that it found you the best site for the information you sought, but that it was simple, uncluttered, and more varied. Yahoo, for example, lead you through a tedious "tree" of options, whereas Google allowed you to choose for yourself.
After all, how were you to know that the links provided by Google were any better than those provided by others?
In other interpretations of Google's success is the auction/bidding model for the advertising it did show. This was apparently so successful that it forced Google to become public, i.e. that the revenue it generated prevented Google from continuing to be a privately-held company. Others here might have a better insight into this aspect of Google's success.
To clarify, reporting requirements for private companies are minimal below a certain level of revenue. Once that level is passed, they need to file.
Google withheld how well its advertising was doing until that threshold was crossed, and it was a surprise to many how much money it was making. This was before its IPO in 2004.
If you haven’t done a search in awhile on Bing it’s also very horrible. In many search’s there are only 1 or 2 organic results in the traditional sense.
Now on Google they are adding paid ads in the middle of the search results, not just the top or bottom.
The reason Google did well was the absence of ads. These LLMs like ChatGPT have now taken that experience that Google has lost.
I used to use Yahoo, which was fairly portal-like with its categories and manually submitted websites. And I got to say, it was far higher quality than 99% of Google search results that are SEO spam.
I still credit dmoz (one of the main data sources back in the days of pre-google portals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ) for giving me good habits for data classification
And come to think of it, it also influenced the way I use social media because I mostly only follow people who curate/recommend interesting links, like back in the day of human curators having ownership of their own categories
Yahoo? Is that a joke? Google won because Yahoo and the others were inferior. Not everyone here is a kid who didn’t know better about Ask Jeeves or Alta Vista, or AOL.
Size of the web does not matter, it is more about not obsessing about cataloging the entire web and focusing on the content offered through the portal. I think the biggest issue to overcome with doing such a thing in 2025 is the death of links pages and webrings, they allowed the portal to give you access to web beyond the sites listed on the portal. But the blog killed the homepage and with it went their links page and the webrings they were members of.
The portals offered a very naturally curated web, the portal curated the sites it listed and each site offered a curated web as well through those links pages and webrings.
“If a GoTo user looks for ‘New York Yankees,’ the first 10 choices are paid advertisers (‘Buy Yankees gear at Fogdog Sports’). On the 11th try you finally get Yankees.com, the official site of the world champs. (On Google, this comes up first.)”
So...we're back to 1999 when the first 10 choices are paid ads?
Why should yankees.com be the first link? The visitor is interested in the baseball team, not necessarily their website. Google shows me a dashboard about the team with games, players, standings, recent results, upcoming games, etc. You can argue that Google hijack the traffic that websites would get otherwise, but I may get more relevant information as end user.
I was quoting from the article that OP linked to...
There are no ads on the results I see for "New York Yankees" on Google right now.
Also there is a HUGE difference in ad quality between the old pay for placement guys and Google. On Google, your ad has to be relevant and will be downranked into oblivion if nobody clicks on it. On Overture and the rest of them, that was not the case, they just auctioned off the results without regard to whether any of it was relevant. I know some of you refuse to believe this, but Google search ads are themselves a corpus of documents that are responsive to the user's search term.
I was quoting from the article that OP linked to...
It would seem there's an opening for a new search engine
The root of Google's malaise is that the web is dying. If I go to yankees.com, I get a 403. The Yankee's official site is now mlb.com/yankees, i.e. they've signed on to the generic Major League Baseball portal and just have a stock database record there. Likely they did this because the cost to run an independent website has ballooned, with all the abuse prevention and detection, anti-spam, hacking & cybersecurity, people who are trying to do something illegal and use your website as a conduit for it, legal regulations, DDoS prevention, etc. stuff you have to do.
FWIW, this site is down about 2-3 screenfuls in Google, well below the fold, so Google isn't blameless here. The results above it are a sports onebox, news universal, and Twitter highlights, though, all about the Yankees/Phillies game tonight, so arguably they are showing what users actually are most likely to want to see.
yankees.com redirects to mlb.com/yankees and this has been the case for decades. All of the clubs have their sites managed by the League. All of the owners went in on MLBAM (MLB Advanced Media) in the 2000s to centralize the tech league wide. MLBAM became BAMTech which then sold to Disney to became Disney+. The league still has a whole tech team to maintaining not only the majors but minor league teams too.
This ought to be illegal.
Google is charging money on other people's brands.
This wouldn't be a problem if there were ten popular search engines, or if portals were still popular and there were ten popular portals.
But what Google has done is gross monopolistic misconduct.
They've "removed the URL bar" and turned it into a search bar. They've put their browser on all devices and made it the default. They've made Google search the default. They've destroyed the ad blocker.
Now, when I search for a brand, I see an ad that looks like an official result in first place.
iPhone -> paid ad
Nike -> paid ad
Midjourney -> paid ad
These are companies' hard earned brands, and yet Google is collecting rent on them.
Google is taxing the entire internet. This ought to be illegal.
Google deserves to be broken up.
Google is not the internet and this behavior is not exclusive to Google. For example TikTok does the same thing. They have search ads when you search for brands on their platform. The TikTok app never had a url bar, TikTok provides search for TikTok, and it never had an ad blocker. Same thing for Amazon, same thing for X, etc.
> Google is not the internet
No, but they are, with ever increasing accuracy, the web.
You don't search TikTok to buy something from BestBuy.com
You use Chrome and Google, and both are interfering with that process. They're sticking themselves in the middle of that transaction and neither you nor Best Buy want them there.
Why not? I guarantee you people search "bestbuy tv" or "bestbuy keyboard" on TikTok. Also don't forget about the BestBuy app, there's an option for consumers to directly visit them without doing so through another app.
When I search Best Buy in the App Store it shows a Walmart app ad at the top…
That is also fucked.
Who uses google to search anymore? LLMs FTW.
That’s such a sad sentiment.
There was a brief moment in history where we could get concise and efficient answers to any question we had.
Now we need to harness the computing power of an LLM to get something remotely similar…and it’s still inherently worse.
at least with a page full of search results I can compare and weed out misleading or garbage results
With an LLM the users are now just taking whatever they get as the truth. Never realizing LLMs are not designed to be accurate.
I only use LLMs when I feel like being lied to.
I think in general it's the wrong conclusion to draw that Google won because they had a simpler layout. That would have been an incredibly flimsy moat. They won because the had much better search results.
Their competitors gambled that the portal-aspect provided additional value that compensated for their shitty search results. It did not. That's also largely why they didn't adopt's Google's minimalist style. If they had adopted a similar design to Google it would have really been an apples to apples comparison, which would not have been flattering.
Remember when a scrappy young Google used to mercilessly mock competing search engines for mixing their search results with paid ads in the same list?
I still remember a conversation I had in the day:
me: "Here, I'll look for that using google, it's just about the best search engine around right now."
colleague: "If it's really that good, why haven't I heard of it?"
me: "You just did"
JFGI was a thing people actually said where I worked at the time. I wouldn’t be caught dead saying that now.
Funny as they always seem to forget the hardware side of search engines. Google was incredibly fast compared to its competitors because they were among the first to store their whole index in RAM rather than on hard drives. They were among the first to install huge data center with computer blades that could be changed in an instant in case of failure. As an early user, I was on board as early as 99, I was amazed by the response speed of Google and its bare style quite dépouillé.
Interesting perspective.
I was in SF at the time, and remember Ask Jeeves, Inktomi, Alta Vista, Yahoo, etc.
Google's attraction at the time was not necessarily that it found you the best site for the information you sought, but that it was simple, uncluttered, and more varied. Yahoo, for example, lead you through a tedious "tree" of options, whereas Google allowed you to choose for yourself.
After all, how were you to know that the links provided by Google were any better than those provided by others?
In other interpretations of Google's success is the auction/bidding model for the advertising it did show. This was apparently so successful that it forced Google to become public, i.e. that the revenue it generated prevented Google from continuing to be a privately-held company. Others here might have a better insight into this aspect of Google's success.
Privately-held companies are allowed to have revenue.
To clarify, reporting requirements for private companies are minimal below a certain level of revenue. Once that level is passed, they need to file.
Google withheld how well its advertising was doing until that threshold was crossed, and it was a surprise to many how much money it was making. This was before its IPO in 2004.
If you haven’t done a search in awhile on Bing it’s also very horrible. In many search’s there are only 1 or 2 organic results in the traditional sense.
Now on Google they are adding paid ads in the middle of the search results, not just the top or bottom.
The reason Google did well was the absence of ads. These LLMs like ChatGPT have now taken that experience that Google has lost.
What are some noteworthy books on Google and its competition in the late 1990s?
I used to use Yahoo, which was fairly portal-like with its categories and manually submitted websites. And I got to say, it was far higher quality than 99% of Google search results that are SEO spam.
I still credit dmoz (one of the main data sources back in the days of pre-google portals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ) for giving me good habits for data classification
And come to think of it, it also influenced the way I use social media because I mostly only follow people who curate/recommend interesting links, like back in the day of human curators having ownership of their own categories
Yahoo? Is that a joke? Google won because Yahoo and the others were inferior. Not everyone here is a kid who didn’t know better about Ask Jeeves or Alta Vista, or AOL.
Not because they were inferior, but just because they were faster.
Do you think it might be possible that today's web is many orders of magnitude larger than the Yahoo directory?
Size of the web does not matter, it is more about not obsessing about cataloging the entire web and focusing on the content offered through the portal. I think the biggest issue to overcome with doing such a thing in 2025 is the death of links pages and webrings, they allowed the portal to give you access to web beyond the sites listed on the portal. But the blog killed the homepage and with it went their links page and the webrings they were members of.
The portals offered a very naturally curated web, the portal curated the sites it listed and each site offered a curated web as well through those links pages and webrings.
Yes, and it is mostly trash.
The good part of the Internet today is way bigger than the entire Internet of 1999.
I think size is a smaller problem than link rot. That is and has always been the slow killer of any web directory.