I’m a Grown Up and I’m Moving On from Google Search

Wren Graves
·4 min read

The post I’m a Grown Up and I’m Moving On from Google Search appeared first on Consequence.

This is a preview of Consequence Daily, our free daily newsletter featuring exclusive analysis and essays. Subscribe now to never miss an issue.

Let’s talk about moving on from Google Search, short term and long term. Google has gotten worse. A study earlier this year confirmed it with regards to product reviews, where low-quality search engine optimized (SEO) spam is dominating the search rankings. As a consumer, I’ve noticed how Google’s engine has become a bit of a pain, but I wasn’t prepared for how badly it handled questions about my kid’s teeth.

My three-year-old sucks his thumb. From his last doctor’s visit I remembered that this was fine at his age but could become a problem if it continued long enough. I couldn’t remember some details, so I checked with the No. 1 free search option. As an experiment, I decided to keep the ask very short and a little vague: Is thumb sucking bad for teeth.

I could have typed in “American Association of Orthodontists” or “Mayo Clinic” but I didn’t, because I wanted to see how Google would respond. And it came back with an avalanche of SEO-optimized pages from small-time dentists and dental groups. This isn’t “low-quality” spam, like when a website that never used a product publishes reviews for affiliate money. This advice was written by licensed medical professionals (or their office manager, or a tech-savvy niece — but you know, dentist approved). But it’s still spam. And while a dental group in Lawrenceville, GA might agree with the AAO, a link to their site is not a better answer to my query. Even the results that weren’t ads still felt kind of like ads.

Everyone’s algo is different and YMMV. In my search, the American Association of Orthodontists ranked seventh overall, below a dentist with some pretty harsh thumb-sucking advice that’s contradicted by the AAO. As a parent, this is just not what I was looking for. As a writer and editor, I’ve noticed for a couple of months that searching and researching is taking more of my time. I think it’s time to face the facts: Google Search kind of sucks. I’m moving on.

google is broken search engine pay walls freemium
google is broken search engine pay walls freemium

(As I say this, I know it’s going to be like when I moved on from Spotify. Most of my listening happens on TIDAL hi-fi, but I come crawling back to the big green circle for podcasts and the occasional playlist rec. Google Images, for example, are still better than the competition, and I’m not close to giving up other Google features like Gmail or Drive.)

In the area of search engines, I’ve been testing Bing, and I also had a detour into DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused setup beloved by people like Joe Rogan. Most of the time, the searches aren’t noticeably different, and if I listed the links in order, you wouldn’t be able to tell which is which. And then, every once in a while, Google just shits the bed, and that shit is made of poorly-digested, SEO-optimized spam. Of course, these classic search engines may be irrelevant within a few more generations of language models. I asked ChatGPT 4.0 about thumb-sucking, and it turned up relevant quotes from Mayo Clinic and AAO just as fast as Bing and faster than Google, including the same clickable links. And when I wanted to find the original studies and read them myself, 4.0 provided them in an instant. (The free version doesn’t do links and can’t help with a bibliography, so it’s worse than Google for my purposes.)

Now, how much time did the AI actually save me? At most, a couple of minutes, at most. But you can kind of see where this is going: Google Search is free and has a lot of ads. ChatGPT costs $20 a month, is already better for some things, and getting better quickly. Search used to be one of the more democratic parts of the internet, but the trend seems to be that eventually, most people will get sorted by their ability to pay.

The thing that’s happening to search isn’t even that unusual. Streaming companies like Netflix introduced ads, in large part to push affluent users up a price tier. Ticket giants and ride share services asked how much we were willing to pay with surge and dynamic pricing. Now even in searching the internet, the best options are getting expensive, and many free options are getting worse.

You don’t have to make another search engine your home page, and I’m certainly not telling anyone to pay for AI. But Google Search hasn’t been clearly better than its competitors for a while, and I’m convinced it’s now worse. You’re not losing much by scrolling past Google’s SEO spam. But what are you gaining?

I’m a Grown Up and I’m Moving On from Google Search
Wren Graves

Popular Posts

Subscribe to Consequence’s email digest and get the latest breaking news in music, film, and television, tour updates, access to exclusive giveaways, and more straight to your inbox.