Written by Brook Schaaf

Are you old enough to remember the early search engine AltaVista, founded in 1995? Its entire cohort is gone or of little relevance today, along with WebCrawler, Lycos, Excite, Infoseek, HotBot, and Ask Jeeves (Directory Yahoo is still around and is doing all right as a portal and media property).

What happened to them? You can Google the answer. They “largely faded into obscurity as Google rapidly gained dominance” (AI Overview, naturally) with a big boost from taking over Yahoo’s search box. The experience was astounding; I daresay it had the same sense of magic as seeing generative text for the first time.

Fast forward to today, and it seems the prophetic warning from Google founders Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page has come to pass: “Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.” This has been much observed anecdotally and, last year, confirmed by a study from Leipzig University. A recent Verge survey discovered that 42% of consumers “find that search engines like Google are becoming less useful.” WalletHub has a persuasive long-form recap of these criticisms, which Ed Zitron, like an Old Testament prophet, lays squarely at the feet of revenue-maximizing executives like Prabhakar Raghavan (maybe he’s the one who started triple-serving ads).

But this is mostly old news. Why mention it now, and what does it mean for affiliate marketing? Aside from the heartbreaking, venture-ending loss of traffic to small players, a newer development may further set the stage for a future disruption. 

• Ahrefs interviewed Charleston Crafted in a video bluntly called “The Google Update That Destroyed 4 Of Their Websites,” a story reminiscent of HouseFresh. You’ll find many such stories. 

• At the same time less traffic is going to small businesses, more traffic is going to Google-owned properties, bringing up charges of hypocrisy, as with Google Store “publishing health content and outranking MayoClinic, ClevelandClinic, Healthline, and other health websites.”  

• Bloggers have seen Google scrape their content while providing little attribution, as found with recipes.

• YouTube has been observed inserting uneditable, random hyperlinks in comments that go to YouTube search results. SEO Lily Ray notes (mocks?) the traffic run-up of Google Travel and points out that “What People Are Saying” might be renamed “What YouTubers Are Saying.” Whatever comes of this, it is shifting online public opinion in a negative direction. 

Is the same company that nuked dozens, if not hundreds, of properties under a policy of Site Reputation Abuse itself guilty of the same? Once again, you have but to Google the answer.

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