The organic search results have also been tweaked over the years to put a greater emphasis on domain "authority." Google SERPs are a very different animal than they were 5 or 10 years ago -- back then there was a greater emphasis on keyword relevancy. Nowadays, you get stuff that doesn't match your search very well, but it comes from a domain that is popular, old, has lots of links, and maybe has a little bit of secret Google blessing because it's a big brand...
People commonly lament that the Web has changed, it's dominated by big brands, it's not weird anymore, etc. I think this is a big part. Google has made these changes in an effort to address some legitimate problems around spam, black/gray hat SEO etc. But they likely have some less user-centric incentives as well ($$$) and either way, Google SERPs have become more boring and less relevant.
There might be an opportunity for disruption emerging because of this. Google knows its search engine isn't very good anymore! That is why they're increasingly trying to pitch their service as a recommendation engine with special AI sauce, not an index of the Web. But frankly as this article demonstrates, what Google wants to recommend comes from a smaller sandbox and often is not the most interesting stuff out there.
If someone can come up with a distribution mechanism which solves the problem of helping the user discover All The Content minus the spammers, scammers and fake news, they will be able to deliver more relevant information than search or social media can today. Google being large actually gives them an in-built disadvantage here because no matter what algorithm they develop, it's going to be everyone's first priority to reverse engineer and game.
People commonly lament that the Web has changed, it's dominated by big brands, it's not weird anymore, etc. I think this is a big part. Google has made these changes in an effort to address some legitimate problems around spam, black/gray hat SEO etc. But they likely have some less user-centric incentives as well ($$$) and either way, Google SERPs have become more boring and less relevant.
There might be an opportunity for disruption emerging because of this. Google knows its search engine isn't very good anymore! That is why they're increasingly trying to pitch their service as a recommendation engine with special AI sauce, not an index of the Web. But frankly as this article demonstrates, what Google wants to recommend comes from a smaller sandbox and often is not the most interesting stuff out there.
If someone can come up with a distribution mechanism which solves the problem of helping the user discover All The Content minus the spammers, scammers and fake news, they will be able to deliver more relevant information than search or social media can today. Google being large actually gives them an in-built disadvantage here because no matter what algorithm they develop, it's going to be everyone's first priority to reverse engineer and game.