Google search is corrupt

Yesterday I received a message from the person who used to write the transcripts for my podcasts. We chatted a bit and then she told me that her google ad campaign got hacked (or something) and that now it’s hard to find her website on google. So in order to be found on google you have to pay them. Which means that if I, as someone who searches, am looking for something I end up at the website with the largest marketing budget. Not necessarily at the website with the best content. That’s bad. That very bad. But it gets worse.

There’s another way to end up high in google’s rankings. You might think it has something to do with taking good care of the content on your websites, but that’s not it. The other way to end up high in google’s rankings is by making sure your website loads fast. Making fast websites used to be pretty easy: use plain HTML and CSS, add a little bit of JavaScript if needed, and make sure your images are small (in kilobytes) and optimised. Today making fast websites is an enormous, and highly specialised industry. If you want to make sure your website loads fast according to google’s guidelines you need some highly specialised experts on your team.

Which means that if you want to end up high on google’s search you either need a very large marketing budget to pay for ads or you need a very large budget to pay for performance experts. These are both budgets that you cannot spend on making proper content. And so you see more and more unredacted, very crappy generated content on websites.