The man who killed Google Search?

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Perceived Decline of Google Search

  • Many commenters say Google web search quality has dropped sharply since ~2016–2019: more SEO spam, “parasite” sites, Reddit/Quora/LinkedIn clutter, and ads that blend with results.
  • People report Google changing queries, prioritizing “popular” or commercial pages over exact matches, and burying small blogs and personal sites.
  • Some note image search and maps still work reasonably well; web results, especially for technical or nuanced queries, are the main pain point.

Ads, Revenue, and SEO Spam

  • Strong view that search has been optimized for ad revenue and shareholder growth, not user value.
  • Several ex-employees describe an OKR/metrics culture where projects that juice ad metrics win, even when obviously bad for users.
  • Others argue SEO spam and low‑quality content across the web are the root cause; critics respond that smaller engines (Kagi, Brave, etc.) manage spam better, implying Google is tolerating it because it’s profitable.

Management, Culture, and “Failing Up”

  • Many see this as a classic “MBA/consultant takeover” story: internal power shifts from product/engineering leaders to growth‑driven managers.
  • Multiple anecdotes from ex‑Googlers:
    • Post‑2016 culture shift to “standard big‑corp” politics, cliques, perf‑driven development, and lack of product vision.
    • Promotion systems that reward shipping anything that moves a metric, not building the right thing.
  • Some push back that blaming one or two executives is scapegoating; structural incentives and the board’s growth demands matter more.

Impact on Creators and the Web

  • Small site owners and SEOs report huge traffic collapses from recent “helpful content” and core updates, with no recourse or feedback.
  • Debate over language like “robbed of livelihoods”: some say building on a single private platform is a gamble, others counter that a 90%‑share search engine is de facto infrastructure and its unilateral changes are socially dangerous.
  • Several argue Google’s behavior has contributed to the “enshittification” of the web and reduced incentive to create open content.

Alternatives and New Paradigms

  • Many have switched or experimented with DuckDuckGo, Brave, Bing, Kagi, or specialized tools. Kagi gets frequent praise, especially for user controls and lack of ads.
  • A growing number now start with LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Bing+GPT) for many queries, using search only for validation or navigation.
  • Some see this as the classic paradigm shift that eventually displaces dominant incumbents; others note Google’s revenues and stock price remain strong, so any “death spiral” will be slow.