Marissa Mayer, the former CEO of Yahoo, was Google\u2019s 20th employee and the one-time leader of its search team, said Google is concerned about the declining quality of the web. <\/p>\n
The comments were made on a recent Freakonomics podcast episode that looked at whether the quality of Google search has declined over the years. The episode also featured comments from former Google executives like Sridhar Ramaswamy, who was the head of its search advertising business and left in 2018, as well as Jeremy Stoppelman, the CEO of Yelp.<\/p>\n
Issues with search. <\/strong>Some issues that Google is facing regarding search are about the\u00a0declining quality of search results and the need to include search terms like \u201cReddit\u201d in a query\u00a0to find answers written by humans. Among the issues has been the increase of AI-generated pages, which are able to game Google\u2019s algorithm to appear near the top of search results, even if the pages are of middling quality. Google has tried to combat the problem by updating its search algorithm<\/a> and\u00a0filtering out pages\u00a0it deems \u201cunhelpful.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n What Google says.<\/strong> Mayer said, \u201cI do think the quality of the Internet has taken a hit.\u201d \u201cWhen I started at Google, there were about 30 million web pages, so crawling them all and indexing them all was relatively straightforward. It sounds like a lot, but it\u2019s small. Today, I think there was one point where Google had seen more than a trillion URLs.\u201d<\/p>\n When asked if URL inflation was responsible for worse search results, Mayer responded \u201cWhen you see the quality of your search results go down, it\u2019s natural to blame Google and be like, \u201cWhy are they worse?\u201d To me, the more interesting and sophisticated thought is if you say, \u201cWait, but Google\u2019s just a window onto the web. The real question is, why is the web getting worse?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Google\u2019s solution.<\/strong> One way Google has tried to fight the overall decline in quality is by supplementing its index of a trillion web pages with some content of its own. If you ask a simple question about cooking or the age of some politician or actor, or even what\u2019s the best podcast, you may see what Mayer calls an \u201cinline result,\u201d or what Google calls a \u201cfeatured snippet.\u201d It\u2019s a bit of text that answers your question right there on the search results page, with no need to click on a link. <\/p>\n Mayer\u2019s response? \u201cI think that Google is more hesitant to send users out into the web. And to me that points to a natural tension where they\u2019re saying,\u00a0\u2018wait, we see that the web sometimes isn\u2019t a great experience for our searchers to\u00a0continue onto. We\u2019re keeping them on our page.\u201d<\/p>\n The ads side.<\/strong> In response to the host referencing a famous quote about advertising income providing an incentive to provide poor-quality search results, Google Search VP Liz Reid responded \u201cwe take great pride in not only trying to provide high-quality results but ensuring that they are not influenced by ads. So we have a very strong culture that has lasted my entire time that says whether or not you\u2019re an advertiser, does not allow you to change the results we show. You cannot pay us to change how you show. Those results are very pure, and we go to great lengths to ensure that that is the case. And so the quality of the search we provide is run separately from the ads to do that. Relevant ads are actually quite helpful to people and people often click on them and if they don\u2019t click on them, they disappear. We don\u2019t get paid if people don\u2019t click on the results, it\u2019s not we just get paid for showing them. But fundamentally, what we can do with the search results isn\u2019t affected by the ads. We build out our search results separately.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Dig deeper. <\/strong>You can listen to the entire Freakonomics episode here<\/a>. <\/p>\n Why we care. <\/strong>Google makes about 80% of its revenue from advertising. But if search results are low quality, users will go elsewhere, like TikTok<\/a>. It\u2019s easy to see how the need to stay relevant could be costing them in the long run. What do you think?<\/p>\n The post Is Google Search getting worse?<\/a> appeared first on Search Engine Land<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Marissa Mayer, the former CEO of Yahoo, was Google\u2019s 20th employee and the one-time leader of its search team, said Google is concerned about the declining quality of the web. The comments were made on a recent Freakonomics podcast episode that looked at whether the quality of Google search has declined over the years. The episode also featured comments from former Google executives like Sridhar Ramaswamy, who was the head of its search advertising business and left in 2018, as well as Jeremy Stoppelman, the CEO […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"h5ap_radio_sources":[],"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-seo-blogs"],"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":false,"author_link":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/author\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6949\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}