Now Google can advertise all they want, but they will inevitably brush up against the tremendous human power of inattentional blindness. Medium-quality content machines often outrank “good” content. Note that it takes up the majority of my 1920 x 1080 monitor.ģ. So not only is Google running a lot more ads than it used to, but the ads tend to blend in pretty well too.įor example, when I Google “iPhone”, here’s what I see – ads are circled in red. Now, if you look up anything on Google, it will say “Ad” in black, bold text. Pretty soon after in 2013, they dropped the color shading, differentiating ads only with the word “Ad.” That standout word increasingly got smaller and then ultimately started to blend in more. Then around 2011, Google got right of the “sponsored link” disclaimer. They also said “sponsored link” in the top right corner. They were shaded in a different color, differentiating them from organic, unpaid search results. In it, you will see how ads have looked on Google over the years.Īs you’ve no doubt noted, up until 2010, ads were very clearly noted. Take a look at this image from this tweet by Google Ads marketing professional, Ginny Marvin. Google is using “dark patterns” to make it harder to tell ads and organic results apart. Even in the mid-to-late 2010s, I don’t recall this being a problem, but at some point, it became one.īut, of course, this is just one contributing factor. This was not a problem when I was in college through the early 2010s. I never had this problem in high school in the late 2000s. Then the unpaid stuff shows up after you start to scroll. Perhaps text ads at the top, shopping ads on the right, and a map containing businesses at the bottom of the screen. That means whatever comes up first is likely to be a screen full of advertisements. Many search inquiries require you to scroll down in order to see organic results. But good grief, as an average Googler, it takes forever to actually see what I want to see. It’s actually really good for certain kinds of businesses, particularly B2B. Now don’t get me wrong, I love Google advertising for ROI. In it, Ryan George does an excellent – and hilarious – job of demonstrating just how much of an ad-driven platform Google has become. The YouTube skit embedded above is actually what inspired me to write this post. 5 reasons why people are adding “Reddit” to their Google searches 1. So with that in mind, let’s talk about why people feel the need to do this in the first place. It’s the natural result of some business decisions that Google has made in the last decade. It’s not just some weird quirky internet behavior. The fact that more and more people are “Reddit” to their searches has deep implications for marketers and business owners alike. Remember: this is happening at the same time that an increasingly large subset of people are trying to thwart Google’s search system to get better results. But when a conspiracy theory like that takes off, it can only do so because it connects with people on an emotional level. Now, of course, it’s a wild theory and impossible to prove or disprove. The idea is called “ dead internet theory.” That is to say, some people believe that most content on the internet is the work of bots and algorithms, which may or may not be controlled by corporations or governments. There are even some people out there who are convinced that, as of about 2016 or 2017, the internet is mostly fake. ![]() There’s a very real problem here that cannot be ignored forever. This amounts to one massive desire path being carved into a computer system we use every day, as people try to fix their poor user experience. Yet more and more people are adding “Reddit” to their search inquiries to get more human, authentic, and useful results. That’s why I’m a skeptic of the narrative that “Google is dying.” It’s hard to unseat that sort of market dominance in any time frame short of several years. To be sure, Google’s market share is not in peril any time soon. The other 8% is Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Baidu, YANDEX, and literally every other search engine combined. Yet Google has almost 92% of the global search engine market share. That would make you think Google’s about to kick the bucket.
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