The man who killed Google Search?

Google is doing something similar now[0], both from a searchers and a site owners perspective.

Barry Schwartz regularly posts Google updates on his site[1], for over a decade no less. Since August 2023, those updates have been reaching the 500 mean comment range with many updates reaching 700-900 comment range. And this has been happening for 8 straight months!

People have been robbed of their livelihoods and many have caught strays, with the culprit being that Reddit, Quora, and LinkedIn have tripled/doubled their traffic.

I just don’t understand why Google can’t create a Discussions panel and let people decide what they want to view as opposed to flat out cutting creators off at the knees.

No content creator thinks to themselves, “let me go write my next article on Reddit”.

Now they are throwing AI in the mix also which is probably the dumbest thing they could have done, but I get why they are doing it.

I hope it clicks for Google soon that they are “fucked” and will never recover users they lost to OpenAI, etc.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40067605

[1]: https://www.seroundtable.com/category/google-updates

Wow, it had been years since I read a Barry Schwartz post, a SEO authority since back in the day, I didn't realize his forum had turned so nasty.

Funny you mention 'No content creator thinks to themselves, “let me go write my next article on Reddit”'. Schwartz and many other SERP/SEO experts talked about writing for medium, circa ~2013, to raise their Google rankings, back when everyone jumped on the medium bandwagon.

Google is bleeding ends users and content creators alike. If search results are getting worse for end users, many AI price points (free or $20/month) or ad-free paid search (Kagi) are eating away at Google's market share. At the other end, content producers which had a symbiotic revenue sharing relationship are also jumping ship.

As you point out, Google will likely never recover, they dropped the ball at both ends: worse end user experience and worse ad revenue sharing, both of which were their lifeblood. I think Google in a few years will be like Yahoo search or AOL email before it, they will still have users, but most likely not by free will, but rather users landed through OEM/marketing deals.