Is Google deliberately degrading quality?

Google’s advertising practices are also subject to investigations or proceedings in Britain, the EU and the United States – Copyright AFP/File Josh Edelson

In light of Google facing the possibility of a court-mandated breakup after being found to be a monopoly, WalletHub’s CEO Odysseas Papadimitriou has told Digital Journal that, based on a recent analysis of search results and court documents, the deteriorating quality of Google search results over the last couple of years is most likely an intentional strategy designed to boost advertising revenue rather than poor execution.

To support his position, Papadimitriou cites:

Going Downhill: 63 percent of people think that Google search results were better last year, according to a nationally representative survey conducted by WalletHub.
 

Cost of Trusting Google’s Top 5 Results on Credit Cards & Banking Terms: $202 on average, according to a WalletHub study.
 

Industry insiders have been warning about this: The SEO industry has been up in arms about the declining quality of Google search.
 

Monopolies do not have to worry about quality: According to court documents (page 48 – section 134), Google’s internal testing showed that significantly worse search results would not hurt the business.

Why would Google act like this?

Poor quality is good for business

Deteriorating quality started after Google’s CEO put the head of Ads to lead both Search and Ads: Google always had a Church/State separation between their ad business and their organic search. In June 2020, Sundar Pichai decided to change that and align the two initiatives for maximum profit. Internal arguments prove that the separation was bad for consumers but good for advertising revenue.

For example, the former head of search wrote: “The nature of how you would easily increase queries is a key reason I don’t like queries as an end metric. The easy ways are almost all bad. Having queries as a metric will, in my opinion, have a subtly bad effect as a launch metric even if we ‘ decide not to do the bad things’.”

Papadimitriou continues to follow the matter closely and remains concerned about the impact on publishers as well as consumers.