This is a categorically false premise. The kind of statement that only makes sense when you're in a deep bubble and entirely removed from the average person's use of the internet.
Deliberately removing yourself from Google is fine for the author who is more concerned about taking an ideological stance than they are about being discoverable, but removing yourself from Google is terribly bad advice for anyone who wants to help people find their content.
Many people do use Google to find content and people, even if you don't.
This is accurate, somewhat. A lot of people do expect to find things of value when the use Google to search.
But people who are more technical know it's a bit of a faff and bother to get Google to spit out what you're actually looking for, outside of "who is Chloe Grace Moretz" or something equally banal.
And Google-the-Company does treat the Internet like it is their corporate property. Alphabet won't change unless it's made to do so.
My brother tried to set me up with a girl last week. She has a pretty uncommon name. Googled her. Found... a lot of stuff.
I have a VERY common name. Think multiple (relatively) famous people (photographers, US Medal of Honor winner, enough lawyers to choke a court system for DECADES), but if you google my name and the city I live in (1,000,000+ people), my LinkedIn is like the second result.
For everyone saying that Google has gotten worse over the time they've been using it, these two use cases (which are pretty challenging) do really still work.
Now it's seven pages of nearly identical listicles, some of which are on bizarre domains like "DougsAutoBodyAndFlowerShop.com", and all of which are festooned with ads, also provided by Google.
Top results (excluding sponsors b/c UBlock Origin):
PC Gamer
The Verge
Games Radar
Youtube (channel: Jarrod's Tech)
A giant ad showing some laptops to buy
Youtube (channel: PC Builder)
RTINGS.com
PC Magazine
Youtube (channel: Top Tech Now)
CNET
Tom's Hardware
Another giant ad showing some laptops to buy
Engadget
PC Magazine
Laptop Mag
TechRadar
These are mainstream tech press sites. And maybe the reason that it's a bunch of similar listicles is because the thing you're looking for (a laptop) is a product with relatively few entries in the market.
What are you expecting here that Google isn't giving you? I'm trying to be as charitable as possible, but, for me, the expected results are about as good as I could hope for.
That's kind of the point. Old Google unearthed things. New Google is where you go to find out what the media (and Google) wants you to know.
If that's what you want, then sure, Google is great.
I used "best gaming laptop" as an example, but you can try "what is the best mayonnaise" if you'd like. My results included Uproxx. Which I guess counts as "unearthing," since I would never go to a clickbait farm like Uproxx for culinary tips.
I'm not suggesting I have an alternative, before you ask. This may be nothing more than the inevitable result of the commercialization and commodification of the Internet. Since all of the search companies are going all-in on AI stuff, you may find yourself in my position in a year or two.
But if these are the complaints about Google - "I only see sites that are so good that they constitute the mainstream" - I'm... ok with that? That seems like a good outcome to me. I don't mind using that tool.
From what I understand of your complaint, sometime in the last 20 years, the Google stopped finding outsider art. I would guess that's due to SEO. And with anything that's known to drive revenue to a business, that sort of thing becomes a target. So people target the Google algorithm to place better. I don't know that there's a solution to that. But I don't think it's because of a change inside Google - more like a change in society.
> Now it's seven pages of nearly identical listicles, some of which are on bizarre domains like "DougsAutoBodyAndFlowerShop.com", and all of which are festooned with ads, also provided by Google.
> From what I understand of your complaint, sometime in the last 20 years, the Google stopped finding outsider art. I would guess that's due to SEO. And with anything that's known to drive revenue to a business, that sort of thing becomes a target. So people target the Google algorithm to place better. I don't know that there's a solution to that. But I don't think it's because of a change inside Google - more like a change in society.
There has been SEO for all of these years, and the search engines have historically been in an arms race with these efforts to minimize how readily ranking can be gamed. "some of which are on bizarre domains" is the more important part of the complaint. It implies that Google has either stopped playing this game or has started losing the arms race.
I have (for years now) been regularly finding search results where pages that are obviously scraped from a stackexchange network site (and more recently from github or reddit and such) and stuffed full of ads are ranking above the original threads on their canonical sites.
Scammy/bizarre/non-canonical domains outranking canonical sources in search results is putting Google-search users at elevated risk of being phished or infected with malware, so it's not like the stakes are low.
As we've watched this drag on long enough to ~metastasize into the kinds of sentiment you're pushing back against, it's grown hard to imagine explanations that boil down to anything ~better than indifference or negligence (and leaving a lot of oxygen for explanations that involve incompetence, malice, etc.).