Why Are You Still Using Google for Searches?

In case you haven’t noticed, Google has been waging war on small publishers for nearly a year now as I write this. Hundreds of really well-written, authoritative sites got hammered by the badly misnamed “helpful content update” and then a subsequent “kick them when they’re down” core update starting in March of 2024. For many publishers, the world’s biggest search engine has gone from frenemy to just enemy.

So why are you still using Google for your web searches?

Yeah I know, Google is the default browser  on your browser and your phone, which is only natural because they’re a monopoly, as a major recent court case in the USA affirmed, probably the first verdict of many. Here’s a brief summary in case you’ve been living in off the grid and missed it.

“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” the judge wrote in his 276-page decision…in which he also faulted the company for destroying internal messages that could have been useful in the case. Mehta agreed with the central argument made by the Justice Department and 38 states and territories that Google suppressed competition by paying billions of dollars to operators of web browsers and phone manufacturers to be their default search engine. That allowed the company to maintain a dominant position in the sponsored text advertising that accompanies search results, Mehta said. – via the Wall Street Journal

Just because a choice is a default, the easy one, doesn’t mean you have to accept it. The default on that ATM scam the banks run abroad is “accept currency exchange” (at a much worse rate than normal) but you’re allowed to decline. Your default choice for tipping at that annoying credit card iPad machine the coffee shop makes you use may be 22%, but you can easily choose 0% instead because all they did was hand you a paper cup of coffee you could have poured yourself if they let you.

Why reward the company that wiped out the income of so many bloggers you know personally? Here’s how one summary of the carnage dealt out to many travel publishers put it:

We’re talking sites that have basically been obliterated, here. Sites that used to enjoy millions of sessions every month being reduced to pretty much nothing. Sites that many people have spent many, many hours working on.

Most people are lazy when they turn on their phone, which makes the monopoly companies of the world like Google very happy. They know that if they pay $26 billion to be the default search engine on your iPhone, you probably won’t bother looking for another option.

This phrase in the subhead below supposedly only gets 480 searches a month…

Google Search Alternatives

Yes, there are Google search alternatives, and quite good ones it turns out. Back when Google hadn’t yet tossed its “Don’t be evil” founders’ principle in the trash compactor (most recently by the man who killed Google Search), Google truly was the best search engine.

That was before they started filling the whole first page with ads and links to their own services, before they started making ads look more like organic results to juice up the revenue. This was before they started moving their own companies’ results and the companies’ results that would earn them a commission or direct ad fees to the top of the page.

Here are a few Google Search Alternatives to start with, ones that will still be around in a few years, but there are far more if you go digging around.

Duck Duck Go

Ecosia

Bing

Brave

Last decade, before the growth-at-any-cost team got the upper hand, a journalist or blogger could really go find answers for their articles they were working on with the biggest search engine. A consumer could actually find useful and helpful travel information.

Those days are long gone. The chances of finding useful, informative travel articles from real experts on the first page are now so low that it may make you want to cry if you spend enough time on their search engine.

The Deterioration of Search Results

Results from the big G were already getting worse before the last two core updates, but now they have deteriorated to the point of being almost unusable. I wonder how anyone is actually finding the information they need anymore unless they’re just looking for a shortcut to Wikipedia or Reddit. Or they’re really just on a shopping trip.

Here’s what the results look like above the fold now if you search on desktop for “best things to do in Buenos Aires.”

You don’t see any result that’s not an ad until you start scrolling and it still goes on and on like that for a while for most results if you keep scrolling below the fold. You have to go a long way down, often to page 2 or 3, before you find even one result that’s not from a big corporate website. Most of what you’ll find are ads or booking sites, mixed in with content farm articles from anonymous writers with no clear expertise.

Once you get past all the ads, links to ads, and “People also ask” suggestions that lead you to more ads on a different page, here are the first 10 organic results on Google for the search above when using incognito mode:

TripAdvisor
Viator
CNTraveler
TimeOut
GetYourGuide
LonelyPlanet
USNews
NationalGeographic
AtlasObscura
CultureTrip

In case you didn’t know, every one of those results is from a massive multi-national corporation or it is a big company being kept afloat by venture capital investors.

Contrast that with the same results on Duck Duck Go, where you get the added bonus of them not tracking your movements all day and keeping your history stored for years until you finally figure out how to manually delete your cookies. Yes, there are 3 paid ads at the top for Viator, GetYourGuide, and TripAdvisor, but then it’s straight to the organic results with no junk to scroll past and the sources are significantly less corporate. Here are the top 10 sources:

USNews
TheCrazyTourist
SecretsofBuenos Aires
TripAdvisor
CNTraveler
LonelyPlanet
TimeOut
TravelandLeisure
GoAskaLocal
JourneybyBackpack

Now let’s take a look at Mexico City, where your search for the best things to do there will get you this buffet of ads on the monopoly search platform:

After scrolling past three very well-defined ads, here are the search results in Duck Duck Go:

CNTraveler
MexicoInsider
Planetware
Tripadvisor
ProjectExpedition
LonelyPlanet
TimeOut
NomadicMatt
TravelandLeisure
The Crazy Tourist

Wow, a few real blogs from real people on the first page! People who have actually been there and know what they’re talking about! Not just corporate sites that are venture-backed or traded on a stock exchange. Which of those two would really help you figure out what to do on YOUR trip before you start laying out money on bookings?

You might actually be able to do some research and make an informed decision, the kind of thing we used to be able to do by searching on the internet.

While Spencer of Niche Pursuits has asked if Google is slowly killing blogging, for many there’s nothing slow about it and the small business owners’ traffic and revenue has shriveled to a tiny fraction of its former size, thanks the monopoly search company turning off the tap. They didn’t run afoul of the rules or do anything wrong. They just got screwed by Big Brother of the Internet.

I’ll admit that searching on Bing, which powers the back end of Duck Duck Go, used to be inferior much of the time 10 or 15 years ago, but as Google has pursued profits hard and user needs have taken a back seat, it’s a different story. Google now clearly cares more now about keeping you on their site instead of you going elsewhere, mirroring the stance of Facebook and other social media sites that push down the emphasis of posts that will take you away from the walled garden.

It’s a new day in search land now because the Google results are often downright sub-par no matter how you look at them. There was a big PR debacle earlier this year when a publication called The Verge trolled Google for a second time with this god-awful article they got to the #1 spot in rankings just because they have a high domain authority. They did everything the search engine guidelines tell you not to do but they leapfrogged over all of the competition anyway simply because of a very flawed search algorithm.

They gave a single recommendation of “The best printer is still whatever random Brother laser printer that’s on sale.” Then they purposely stuffed the article with spammy keywords and synonyms, showing just how bad the Silicon Valley engineers are doing now that the bean counters changed the search algorithm priorities.

Stop here. Go read the article linked above; it’s hilarious!

We used to get good results from searching the biggest engine, the one that’s the default on your phone. But that was before Google declared war on small publishers who really know what they’re talking about. You know, the people with authority and expertise, something the Big G says is important, but doesn’t really support in the algorithm. (Do as we say, not as we do.) Here’s what the BBC had to say about it after witnessing the new crop of results.

What’s often lost is what you’re probably looking for when you open up Google: information from people who are knowledgeable and passionate about their topic.

If you want to repeat my example above with your own searches, I encourage you to do that. Open up incognito mode (because you’re being tracked by Google with every move you make, don’t forget) and then do identical comparisons between the default one and an alternative like Bing or Duck Duck Go.

Start with searching something like “luxury travel in [insert country]” or “best boutique hotels in [insert city].” In the first half of last year, before small publishers got chopped off at the knees, you would get a healthy range of reviews, direct company links, tourism board sites, and round-ups. These days it’s all ads, corporations, and a sprinkling of outdated Reddit advice from the likes of BasementDude2089.

Now the luxury travel query above will usually give you nothing but tour companies, the kind of companies most likely to spend money on advertising. The latter will give you nothing but hotel chains and OTA links, also regular advertisers with the company showing you results. The actual round-up stories to help you make a choice are buried on page 3 or 4.

That’s great if you’re ready to book a tour right this minute or book a room at the Marriott today, but terrible if you’re trying to just figure out where to go or what neighborhood to stay in.

So why are you still doing your searches there? Why reward this behavior with your actions?

Taking What Google Says With a Whole Box of Salt

While all of this was going on, the monopoly search engine was telling us that if we followed their recommendations and established our expertise, experience, authority, and trust, we’d be in great shape in their search engine. That turned out to be a fantasy version of what’s really happening.

The whole E-E-A-T thing has been exposed as just one of the many lies the monopoly search engine has been feeding us, along with other lies like the Google sandbox and whether big corporate publishers get a pass on terrible content. It even looks like at the same time they were talking a good game about supporting small business, they were actually putting their finger on the scale to pump up the results from big corporations and Reddit.

While the algorithm may have hundreds of factors, the main ones seem to be domain authority, inbound links, and brand recognition, meaning the bigger and more corporate the site, the better. And for whatever reason, G manually gave Reddit a massive boost, then paid them a $60 million subscription fee on top of it just as the company was setting up their IPO.

If you want to learn more, here’s a really wonky, in-depth investigation of the leaked documents from Search Engine Land. As Rand Fishkin, Moz founder and frequent Google lies target said, ““I think the biggest takeaway is that what Google’s public representatives say and what Google search engine does are two different things.”

As Gizmodo said in this article, “For SEO, an industry that lives and dies by Google’s algorithms, the leaked documents are an earthquake. It’s like the NFL’s referees rewrote the rules of football halfway through the season, and you’re just finding out while playing the Super Bowl.”

And this: “Many in the SEO industry are taking these documents as confirmation of what the industry has long suspected: A website deemed popular by Google may receive a higher Search ranking for a query even though a lesser-known site may have better information.”

Surely you’ve seen this if you’re using the default search engine on your phone or browser. But they don’t need to care because they’ve got a monopoly. That monopoly company is appealing their guilty verdict in the courts though, which might mean years of delays. So you can only break that abusive power by taking action.

You Can’t Completely Escape Using Google but…

This all may sound hypocritical from a guy using an Android phone, a person frequently using Google Maps, and a guy who has shared more than a few files with others using Google Drive. I also use ad networks on my other sites that are joined at the hip with a division of Alphabet.

That’s the problem with a monopoly company: you can’t truly get away from them unless you stop using the market they serve. In this case that’s the modern internet.

Just as you once couldn’t make a phone call without using AT&T, it’s now quite hard to use the internet’s many functions if you don’t cue up Google now and then. But you can at least change your habits for their main revenue channel.

I do what I can to avoid the activities that really make Alphabet most of its profits: ads in search and ads in Gmail. Around 75 cents of every dollar that Alphabet earns is from ad revenue, some of that coming from YouTube.

The company doesn’t really make a meaningful profit from its browser or its phone operating system. Its cloud storage division just barely eked out a profit for the first time last year. Revenue from Maps is a rounding error in the big scheme of things.

It does use its Chrome browser to spy on you though and gather data it then uses for search (something they long denied but have now confirmed thanks to the antitrust suits). So at the very least, if you use Chrome then clear your cookies daily. Or use incognito mode.

Starting now though, change your default search engine. You can do that on your phone or on your desktop by just downloading an app and changing your home page settings. It’ll feel like someone has moved your cheese, I know, so it’ll take some time to get used to.

After a while though, you’ll find that you’re scrolling less, getting to meaty articles faster, and you’re not being pushed into booking/shopping choices when you’re just trying to figure out what the best options are for your situation. It’s a great productivity enhancer.

Change your search engine and encourage your readers/followers to do the same. Cracks are already showing in Google’s market share and the new ChatGPT search engine looks like it’s going to be a lot more publisher-friendly than G’s lame AI search function from what we’ve seen so far, actually crediting the source and linking to it. So we may ironically get more traffic from an AI search engine than we do from the one that greedy humans tweaked into the ground.

Here are a few options:

Duck Duck Go

Ecosia

Bing

Brave

While Big Brother has the kind of numbers that only dictators and monopolists can dream of, they are losing some market share from the crappy results, despite the many billions they’ve spent trying to keep competitors out of their space. According to Search Engine Land, their share has now dropped to 86.58%, with competitors picking up the slack.

Google has been consistently losing U.S. search market share since August 2023, when it was at 89.03%. Google’s highest search market share in the past 12 months was 89.1% in May 2023.

Among the people I know who do searches 100 times a day for their job, I’m seeing a lot of switching. So if more of us follow the trend and vote with our actions, the market share is only going to get worse for Daddy Warbucks.

Every week I hear of someone dropping the monopoly search engine as their default browser. As more of these power users switch, we can only hope that the pressure will find its way to the boardroom, in the only language that Alphabet now seems to understand: money.

Are you now saving hours of scrolling and getting better results from an alternative search engine after abandoning Google for searches? Let me know how it’s going in the comments!

The article is written from the perspective of a travel publisher on the sidelines (for now). One of my sites declined, one went up, and the others stayed flat over the past year. So I was one of the lucky site owners who didn’t see all my traffic evaporate through no fault of my own. Therefore, this is not an expression of personal rage and revenge.

I stopped using Google for searches in 2022. I’ve been using Duck Duck Go almost exclusively since then. I got tired of not being able to find the most useful websites I read and use on a regular basis. Then it got even worse starting in September 0f 2023. So yes I’m hurt, disappointed, and angry with a huge corporation that’s so central to our lives putting profit over people and intentionally making their core product worse to squeeze out a few more dollars from the gullible. I hope they’ll change, but none of the statements made thus far by the executives gives me any sense that they care about the damage they have done and the worsening results they’re sending us every day.