This kind of virtuous rising tide rent, which benefits everyone, doesn’t last. Once the growth of the new market slows, the now-powerful innovators can no longer rely on new user adoption and collective innovation from a vibrant ecosystem to maintain their extraordinary level of profit. In the dying stages of the old cycle, the companies on top of the heap turn to extractive techniques, using their market power to try to maintain their now-customary level of profits in the face of macroeconomic factors and competition that ought to be eating them away. They start to collect robber baron rents. That’s exactly what Google, Amazon, and Meta are doing today.
— Tim O’Reilly, Rising Tide Rents and Robber Baron Rents: The Replacement of Organic Search with Advertising by Google and Amazon and What That Might Mean for the Future of AI
See also:
The Man Who Killed Google Search by EDWARD ZITRON: This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it. (Hat tip: mORA.)
Search Party (2009): Triple Issue No. 292 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, is all about search. By JOHN FERRARA, AVINASH KAUSHIK, and LOU ROSENFELD.
Illustration: Kevin Cornell
2 replies on “Suckage begins here: why search engines now prioritize advertising over good UX”
I hope there comes a time when we own our data/content (via some block chain system) or have personal AIs not attached to a third-party. Which will all make the robber baron scenario harder to reach
Loving the new design and seeing more of Kevin Cornell’s illustrations after what seems like many years. I’d written a long comma, parenthesis, and em-dash filled comment, only to have NetNewWire eat it on account of what should have been a tap, but turned into just enough of a swipe to reload the page. Sigh. The long of it short was that this is why I’ve started leaning into paying for more and more services I’d previously taken for granted. I realize I’m fortunate to be in that position. But Google’s search is now broken by design, DuckDuckGo is hampered by Bing… I’ve been very happy with Kagi’s results, and happy to no longer be the product I’m supposedly using for free.