This year, Google has been in several scandals regarding AI, but we can’t forget about the pickle it’s in regarding its main moneymaker, Search. People across the internet and tech industry have said that Google’s search results have been getting worse over the past couple of years. Well, that’s not just a hunch, as an extensive study by WalletHub just found out that Google is indeed ruining Search, and most people agree with this.
We all know that Google’s most lucrative product is Search. The ad revenue it gains from displaying search results keeps lights on at Google’s HQ and Pixel devices in fans’ pockets. You’d expect the company to do its best to make sure that Search is in the best shape it can be. However, the company has been accused of messing up the algorithm over the past couple of years.
This is sad because Google Search doesn’t only benefit you when you’re searching for a recipe for chicken tacos. It benefits millions of companies that rely on it surfacing their websites. It also splits a ton of ad revenue with said companies to help them pay their bills.
The study
WalletHub did a study where it analyzed 48 of the most popular credit card and banking terms searched by consumers. It based its results on those metrics, so things could be different when studying different terms. Still, this gives us a good idea of what’s going on with Google’s algorithm and approach to Search.
The results are based on the top 10 results that appear when searching for the terms.
Along with the study, WalletHub surveyed over 550 people on July 19th.
How Google is ruining Search
As you may know, a large amount of Google’s income comes from companies paying it to put their sites at the top of search results. Seeing sponsored results isn’t a major issue, as we’re all used to seeing them across the internet. For example, sponsored posts exist on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, X, etc.
The number of sponsored results can be ridiculous
Sponsored pages become a problem when we factor in the quality of these results. You get what you search for. Or, that’s what we’ve been taught. But the sad reality is that Google can be biased toward sponsored pages because it’s getting a paycheck from them. So, you’re likely to see sponsored search results, no matter if they’re quality or not.
This is a testament to how Google seems to be getting more money-hungry. Before, the company would focus on serving you more relevant results at the expense of some ad revenue. Nowadays, things seem to be different.
In its study, WalletHub found that 34% of the time, all top 10 results were sponsored. That’s a pretty big issue. When searching Google, people aren’t likely to scroll past the first 10 results. So, when presented with more than 10 sponsored search results, people are likely to click on a sponsored link.
This makes it clear that Google is more concerned with earning more money from search results than surfacing relevant pages. We’ve all had instances when sponsored search results would point to results less relevant than organic results. For example, when you search for a specific brand, the top sponsored results are for competing brands. That defeats the purpose of searching.
Sponsored page transparency is pretty low
The study also found that most of the sponsored pages aren’t upfront about being sponsored. More than half of the time, pages try to hide the fact that they paid for their top spot in the search results. The study found that 58% of the pages aren’t transparent.
According to the company’s methodology, a page is transparent if it indicates so at the “top part of the page, in a font that is not considered fine print, and avoided using vague language (such as “may receive compensation”) when showing only advertiser products.”
Google should come up with some sort of rule for companies advertising with it to disclose whether they’re sponsored. People need to know whether they’re getting the best results or not.
It’s easy for any company to pay to promote their half-baked services or products. Knowing that a page is sponsored could, ostensibly, lead to fewer people interacting with the product, but at the end of the day, it’s more important that people get quality services, not just services that the company paid to have plastered on the front page.
Along with sponsored pages, people are tired of ads in general. According to the survey, the majority of people think that there are too many ads on Google search pages. More than half of the group think that the number of ads is too high.
Another group of people feel that the company shows too many irrelevant ads.
Search results are typically not relevant
Another part of the study was evaluating whether Google has been surfacing relevant results. During the study, WalletHub found that only about 41% of the top 10 results actually met users’ intent. Looking at the chart below, we see the other types of sites that would pop up within the top 10 results.
We see that 46% of the results didn’t meet users’ needs. So, there are typically more irrelevant search results than relevant results. 12% of the results lead users to forums, which can have their own issues. The remaining 1% of the results lead to video sites.
This illustrates a pretty big issue with Google. When you search for information on banking or finance, you’re either inundated with sponsored pages, results that don’t give you relevant information, forums that are full of more questions than answers, or video sites.
This is one of the reasons why people think that Google’s Search has gone downhill. In fact, 63% of the people surveyed think that Google Search was better last year. So, most people agree that Google is ruining Search.
This is costing you more than you know
WalletHub didn’t only conduct this study to blow smoke up Google’s skirt. The company also crunched some numbers to find out how much this tactic is costing the average user. Again, it analyzed several search terms dealing with credit cards and banking. This means that the search results and subsequent services could have a major financial impact on the users.
Well, as it turns out, the search results that Google turns up can actually cost people money. It doesn’t cost them money directly. Rather, people can be spending more money paying off loans and credit cards using the top Google results compared to recommended cards and banks from actual financial companies.
For this study, WalletHub took the top credit card from each search and calculated how many costs a user would incur compared to the best credit cards that WalletHub recommends. It also calculated how much money people would spend using the banks shown in Google’s top results compared to the banks recommended on WalletHub.
The cost
The company factored in a ton of conditions like interest paid to the user, interest accrued when paying off a loan, introductory APR, standard APR, fees, different amounts of money, etc. When all was said and done, it found that using the top results from Google could cost users an average of $203 more than using banks and credit cards recommended by WalletHub.
Typically, when people are looking for credit cards or banks, they’re not looking to pay more money for basically the same service. So, it’s sad seeing that Google is serving up results that can cost people money in the long run. Obviously, this number can vary over time, but it highlights an issue with Google’s search results and the dichotomy between sponsored search results and results delivered by dedicated financial services.
You shouldn’t always choose the first results that you see on Google. Google isn’t going to tell you which companies are going to give you the best deals. It’s showing you results from the companies that pay the most.
Google’s bias toward big brands
Google Search tends to turn into a popularity contest rather than a selection of relevant results. According to the survey conducted by WalletHub, the majority of people feel that Google surfaces popular brands over smaller brands. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, as big brands tend to draw the most traffic. Thus, Google can earn more ad revenue from them.
Looking at the graph, we see that 75% of the people surveyed feel that Google is biased toward top companies. Just doing a quick Google search for “Credit card”, the first five results were from Capitol One, Bank of America, Discover, Chime, and Bank of America again. So, if you’re searching for a credit card, you’re going to have to scroll a bit before you have a chance of finding a smaller brand.
Sure, if you opt for a bigger brand, there’s the chance that you’ll get a better service, but that’s not a guarantee. Also, people want something different. Based on the results, 84% of the surveyed audience wishes that Google surfaced more independent websites. That’s an overwhelming amount, and it just shows how Google is not delivering what the people want.
Biased toward #1
On the subject of big brand bias, there’s one brand that people think Google is unfairly promoting, and that’s Google. A commanding number of people feel that Google unfairly promotes its products.
Since Google is the owner of Search, that gives it the ability to use it to boost its own products and services. This is something that landed Amazon in hot water. The e-commerce giant was accused of unfairly promoting its own brand of devices over other companies trying to sell on it.
At this point, we’re unsure if Google is actually unfairly promoting its products. However, this is what the people think.
Google is ruining Search, and people aren’t happy with Google
As we’ve seen from the survey, people think that Google is ruining the Search experience. What makes this worse is the fact that it’s the biggest search engine in the world. No other engine can come close to it. In March of this year, Bing, Google’s biggest competitor, received a hefty 1.4 billion visits. Well, Google got more than 85.5 billion visits in the same time period.
This means that the company can muck about with its search algorithm without facing any major consequences. The question is how long can Google keep up like this? According to the survey by WalletHub, the majority of the surveyed group wishes that Google had more competition.
Google’s questionable approach to search leads to an overall more annoying search experience, but the beauty of WalletHub’s study is that it illustrates how people can be affected by this financially. That’s tangible. If you signed up for a credit card recently or signed up for a new bank, there’s a chance that Google’s search results led you to pay more money than you need to.
The report doesn’t only apply to financial help. Google is a far-reaching company, and people go to it for a ton of reasons. If the company is giving biased and ad-riddled results when you’re searching for credit cards, it can realistically do the same thing for people searching for anything else.
A new age for Google
It’s clear that Google is not what it once was. While Google search results were never perfect, they were much better than they are now. The company wasn’t as bent on surfacing ads and irrelevant results. Now, it’s a major issue.
It seems like Google is prioritizing money, and that is ruining the Search experience. Users have to wade through a sea of sponsored pages, ads, pages from big brands, and irrelevant results just to find the results that they want. It’s actively hurting smaller brands while bringing down the search experience, and it’s not doing anything to fix it.
Rather, the company is working on making Google Search into an AI experience. We can’t deny that this is contributing to Google’s decisions with Search. Instead of making Search a better product, it’s still working on implementing AI Overviews and making them the new norm.
Google has entered a new age; it’s now more driven by AI and money, and there’s no telling if it’s going to be good for the company. However, all we know is that it’s bad for everyone else involved.
