“Google search is dying”: last February 15, on DKB (a US blog that deals with technology and society) was published an article with at least a bold title. A piece that, to sum it up, says one simple thing: although Big G still has an absolute monopoly of online searches, his service always works worse and it is much more difficult than before to find interesting content.
A few months later, on The Atlantic, a piece signed by Charlie Warzel appears which tells a very similar story: it starts from a personal experience, such as the need to find a solution for a domestic plumbing problem that leads, now almost automatically, to the search for a solution on Google. Solution that, according to what Warzel wrote, does not arrive: “Virtually everything I found was not helpful, so we did things the old way and called a pro. The problem came and went, but I kept thinking about those poor search results, how they represented a wasteland of Internet reduced to a zombie den”.
About 4.5 billion people log into Google every day. Virtually all of them, if we consider that they are online (the data is from April 2022) approximately 5 billion users worldwide. In other words, the news of the death of such a giant certainly appears exaggerated, paraphrasing a famous phrase. But there is a sense that Big G is changing and is different from what we have come to know since 1997. And there are at least 3 directives to tell about this change.
Interview
Sundar Pichai: with Google on the side of peace and prosperity
by Bruno Ruffilli
Advertising
“We expect ad-funded search engines to be inherently advertiser-oriented and away from consumer needs. In addition, advertising revenue often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results “: according to 1998, they were Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Googlestill struggling with the debut of what would become the most important search engine in the world.
A few years later, Brin and Page would have to come to terms with reality: the best business model for Google was advertising, despite everything. And that’s how, even today, Big G makes money on searches. When we are faced with the results, a part of these (the first, usually) are advertisements: someone has paid to appear there, as also indicated by the wording Announcement. The feeling is that the number of these paid achievements is constantly growing: try to find any product on your smartphone, you will find that the so-called organic results (the real ones, in other words) are at least a couple of scrolls away.
SEO
How do you appear on the first page of Google? It’s a request that many (companies, organizations, newspapers) do. There is an algorithm that, in the first instance, indexes all the results by individual keywords and then puts them in order based on a series of criteria. And there is a discipline that has the objective of placing Web pages high on Google in an organic way, that is, without resorting to advertisements. Is called SEO (la sigla sta per Search Engine Optimization) and includes a series of indications, techniques and writing, to favor the possibility that a particular site or page appears among the first results of searches.
All good so far. Among the techniques used by SEO there is a writing method that is not exactly the most intuitive. You may have read some article that, before answering the question for which you are reading it, there repeatedly confirms that he is going to, that on that page you will find the solution to your problem, which is cited for a few lines before getting to the point of the question. This writing mode aims to increase the chances of ending up on the front page (but the certainty is never there, because it is the algorithm that decides), because it is a way to tell Google’s artificial intelligence that that content solves that very problem. And this regardless of the actual quality of that page.
tutorial
Privacy, 10 easy countermeasures to better defend ourselves
by Emanuele Capone
Artificial intelligence
Google was born as a window to the world. A space through which, even just by typing a handful of words, we can have different voices, blogs, sites of all kinds just a click away. The direction in which it is going, however, is very different. More than a window, Google is increasingly becoming an assistant: a system, in other words, designed to give us answers, rather than to offer us possibilities.
Originally, Google’s algorithm was simpler: it searched for correspondence between the words searched and those present in the text and evaluated the trustworthiness of a page based on links that the latter received. It still is, to a small extent, but the focus of Big G’s AI has shifted a lot on the system’s ability to understand each user’s search intent. What do we want when we look for a model of smartphone? Maybe buy a new one, and it is from this that the search results will appear on our screen.
Results that, by now, are increasingly integrated into Google services. There is the carousel of products, the maps if we look for a place, the reviews, the related questions. It is increasingly common to find the answer to your question right away, without even getting to the list of results. So that in 2020, about two-thirds of searches ran out within Googlewithout the person needing to click on any link.
At the end of March 2022, Google consolidated this direction with the launch of MUM, an artificial intelligence able to better understand the user’s needs and to provide text, images and videos in response. Research is increasingly a conversation with an AI, which fishes into a database to provide us with answers and (only secondarily) a list of links to learn more about.