Google is far and away the most dominant search engine on the planet, with an enormous share of the search engine market. Just because Google search is dominant, however, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good. In fact, the opposite is true; the quality of Google search has been getting worse and worse, and it’s possible to identify the moment when it all went wrong.
In the Good Old Days, Google Was a Lexical Search Engine
Google search wasn’t always awful. Back in the day, it did exactly what it was supposed to do. You would enter a search query, and Google would look for the exact keywords in your search query across the internet. It would only return results that contained the keywords that you searched for.
This is known as lexical search. Lexical search doesn’t try to understand your intent; it simply tries to match the specific words you enter in your query. If you type “Everest height” into a lexical search engine, it doesn’t guess that you probably want to know the height of Mount Everest. It just looks for web pages that have the words “Everest” and “height” on them.
Most web pages that contain information on how high Mount Everest is will have the words “Everest” and “height” on them somewhere, so the results for this search query in a lexical search engine will almost always be useful ones. You might get the odd result that contained those words but was totally unrelated to the mountain, but you were always guaranteed to get results that contained your keywords somewhere.
Lexical Search Made Googlewhacks Possible
The way that Google used to work as a lexical search engine meant that you could entertain yourself by trying to find Googlewhacks. A Googlewhack was a Google search query containing exactly two valid dictionary words, which when entered without quotes, returned just a single result. In other words, the game was to try to find a combination of two words that only appeared on one single page across the entirety of the internet.
For example, some former Googlewhacks included “ambidextrous scallywags”, “squirreling dervishes”, and “fetishized armadillo”. Googlewhacks tended to be very short-lived, as the action of posting one you’d found online would mean that a second web page would now contain those two words, and the Googlewhack would no longer be valid.
The British comedian Dave Gorman got an entire book and stage show out of Googlewhacks. The premise was that he wanted to create a chain of 10 Googlewhacks, where the owner of the website where each Googlewhack was found would have to find the next Googlewhack in the chain. He traveled throughout America, Europe, Australia, and China, meeting web hosts and going slightly insane. If you’ve not read the book, it’s definitely worth checking out Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure.
Googlewhacks Truly Died When Google Changed How It Worked
As more people searched for Googlewhacks, they became harder to find, as adding them to the list of discovered Googlewhacks instantly removed them from existence. However, the age of the Googlewhack truly came to an end when Google fundamentally changed how its search engine worked.
Google moved away from lexical search and instead started to focus on semantic search, which is when a search engine tries to understand the intent behind a query rather than just searching for keywords. It began in 2012 with the introduction of the Knowledge Graph. This is a huge database of information that Google uses to connect words in search queries into “things, not strings”.
The example Google gave at launch was the query “taj mahal”. A lexical search engine would look for the word “taj” and also look for the word “mahal”. Using the Knowledge Graph, however, it’s possible to understand that those two words together refer to a specific thing, whether that’s the famous monument or the musician of the same name.
In 2013, Google introduced its new Hummingbird algorithm. This search algorithm focused on natural language processing and tried to figure out the intent of the search query rather than just matching the keywords.
It was at this point that the Googlewhack truly died, because when you type two words into a semantic search engine, it’s not looking for pages containing those exact two keywords. It’s looking for what it thinks those two words mean. A search for “fetishized armadillo” suddenly yields results that are far less innocent than the original Googlewhack.
Since Then, Google Search Has Gotten Worse and Worse
Google made the switch to semantic search in an effort to make search better. Unfortunately, that’s far from being the case; Google search is now far, far worse than it used to be, and search result quality continues to deteriorate. If you use Google search even a little, you’ll almost certainly have ended up frustrated by how hard it is to get Google to return useful results for even seemingly simple queries.
The trouble is that Google has taken things too far. When you enter a search query now, the algorithm is so intent on searching for what it thinks you meant that it will actively change your search query to something else.
Some of this happens behind the scenes, but a lot of it is rubbed right in your face. I recently saw a meme that was in English but contained the Swedish word “solidaritetsersättning”. I Googled the word to find out what it meant, but Google decided that I didn’t actually want to know what that word meant; what I actually meant to search for were the two separate words “solidaritet” and “ersättning,” with the top of results page proudly stating that “these are results for solidaritet ersattning.”
According to Google Translate, those words translate separately as “solidarity” and “replacement”, when the word as a whole in fact means “solidarity payment.” Google was now searching for something different from what I had explicitly asked for, and this is something that it does a lot.
If you think placing your search query in quotes will fix the problem, think again. I put quotes around the single word “solidaritetsersättning” and tried again. Once again, Google ignored my clear intention to search for that specific word, and gave me results for the two separate words, none of which were any use whatsoever.
I Miss the Days When Google Search Results Were for You Rather Than Google
It’s incredibly frustrating when Google search actively ignores key parts of your query to bring you results that are completely irrelevant. So many times, I see results on the first page that have one of the most important words from the query struck through underneath the result, indicating that the result is for a rephrased query that omitted the crucial word. It’s really no surprise when those search results then turn out to be completely unhelpful.
All of which brings out my cynical side. Why are Google search results getting worse rather than better? Is there a reason beyond the law that good tech services always get worse eventually?
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If Google search is rewriting our queries in the background, then there’s nothing to stop it from changing those queries into ones that are likely to yield more profits. Google makes money from advertisers who pay to have their ads appear alongside search results for specific keywords, and some keywords are worth far more than others. Could it be that Google is rewording our search queries not to make our search results better (because they clearly aren’t) but rather to make the query a more profitable one?
This is pure speculation, and I’m not saying this is definitely what is happening. Google search could simply be worse because the internet has gotten so much bigger, or because its algorithms just aren’t as good as they used to be. Only Google really knows.
We always tend to look back on the past with rose-colored glasses, but in the case of Google search, there’s no denying that it’s much, much worse than it used to be. The concept behind using semantic search instead of lexical search may have been a good one initially, but it’s gone so far the other way that it’s almost impossible to get Google to search for what you actually want. Sadly, it doesn’t look like it will change any time soon, so we’re all left dreaming of the good old days when the Googlewhack was still a thing.