As most of you know, I try to avoid Google as much as possible. In particular, I haven’t used the Google search engine in years. But that’s because of privacy concerns and Google’s sordid record of vacuuming up as much of their users’ information as possible. I’ve always assumed, though, that Google probably had the highest quality search results in the industry. That’s undoubtedly been true in the past; after all, Google invented modern browsing indexing techniques and has been at it for a very long time.
Then I read this Twitter thread by Michael Seibel, a partner and director at Y Combinator. The TL;DR is that, at least in certain categories, Google search results are of very low quality with the top results dominated by “clickbait sites riddled with crappy ads”. Later in the thread, Tanay Jaipuria points to one of his Substack posts in which he shows the results of a Google search for “health insurance”. The first page has only one result that is not an ad.
Seibel speculates—and Jaipuria concurs—that Google may be ripe for some disruption. Paul Graham picked up on the idea with a thread of his own on the idea of going after a niche overrun with SEO spam. Seibel posits that these dismal results are not the result of sudden bad engineering but of short term bottom line obsessed executives who are insisting on ever more ads in the results. It wouldn’t be the first time suits overly concerned with the next quarter results have made bad decisions.
Betteridge’s law mandates that the headline’s answer should be “no” but Seibel and Jaipuria make a pretty compelling case. Happily, I have no direct experience to make my own determination.