Google is NOT the search engine we deserve today

Google was designed in 1998 with the invention of a page-rank algorithm that was heavily dependent upon storage of links to websites and coming up with a complex optimization algorithm to present those links to user in an order that the user is likely to find most useful.

Google decided to adopt a monetization strategy of giving out top few links to advertisers for a fee. The seeds of this monetization strategy is what I believe has made Google a slow-moving dinosaur who’s waiting for the next meteorite to hit and drive it to extinction, because it still relies on an internet architecture made of links to websites.

To get this point well, you have to think of what kind of searches you do, how many steps it takes to get you to an answer, and whether Google’s current layout of indexed website links is really what you think you deserve in the year 2020 when the way we consumer information from the internet has changed so rapidly — through Alexa commands, mobile interfaces, car interfaces, VR/AR, wearables, etc.

I got this idea when I was studying a finance-related concept and had to search for multiple financial definitions and differences between two topics on Google, and found myself looking through the top 3–5 links every single time and arriving on the same website called Investopedia. I thought Google should have ideally just redirected me to the right Investopedia page and not shown me 9 other unnecessary links, or better just shown me the information right there and then, similar to when I search Tom Hanks and it shows me Tom Hanks bio quickly with all the movies he has done. So I thought why doesn’t Google provide this deep-search capability in more scenarios, such as the Investopedia use case? It’s probablly because: A) it takes time to develop API integrations with each of these companies such as Wikipedia, Investopedia, etc., but more importantly: B) Even if Google displays quick info on the top of search links it would never be incentivized to entirely skip the process of going through the search links because that’s where it earns its revenues from.

It made me think what other searches I did in the day and whether Google’s current view of showing me links of 10 websites that could answer my search query really makes sense or not. Turns out in most of the cases it didn’t.

Take the case shown with an image on the left of this search: “flight from new york to paris at 12pm on 11 May”. If I was not introduced to Google, I would assume that an ideal search engine would most likely give me a list of all websites offering me flights at this time, flight details, prices and a book button which could either book me a flight then or take me to a website that could book me a flight. Instead, Google gave me a list of 10 aggregator websites and expected me to go and search within each of these. Why? Because Google is so heavily dependent on its monetization model of taking fee for top 3–6 slots of sponsored ads on its links-based search engine that it is willing to let users experience an age-old design interface for search, while it could have easily partnered with a handful of these aggregators and shown us the flight prices and book buttons right there instead of showing 10 links. Yes, Google does own Google Flights and shows some of its meta-deta for some flight searches but it feels extremely basic and not useful.

So is Google aware of this problem? It seems they are, and they’re trying to fix it. They’ve been trying to implement deep search capabilities since a long time in both PC and mobile. Google also realized the threat of people using search in mobile apps directly so they forced all Android developers to add deep-search capabilities in their apps so that content in apps is searchable via its classic list-based link-based search interface. They’ve also partnered with travel companies to display basic flight search results quickly, with Wikipedia to show a widget with wikipedia information about anything, with weather.com to show weather in a neat widget format on top of search links, and so on and so forth. But Google always places that easily accessible info widget on top of search results in a way that it occupies a maximum 10–20% of overall page space while that should be 80–100% of space on the website.

So, that means that Google is finding it slow to reinvent itself due to the huge burden of its monetization model. One of the reasons is there is no clear way to monetize the other ‘deep search’ model yet, except through individual agreement with companies such as Wikipedia and SkyScanner for establishing APIs and driving traffic to their websites.

This makes me think the time is ripe for a new innovative startup to take up the responsibility of redesigning the search experience without the baggage faced by big-tech, with an open mind, and in a way that it’s designed for not just PC consumption (as Google’s search engine was) but also for mobile, audio and other interfaces.

Food for thought.