this post was submitted on 04 May 2024
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It's an example of why monopolies are harmful. They create distorted economies that don't serve consumers. Like ecosystems overcome by a monoculture, monopolies are inherently less resilient, less functional and prone to sudden disruption.
How exactly would it be any different without Google / SEO. Parsing of website content to determine topics would be a shit show historically, or ridiculously computation heavy now that LLMs could conceivably do a decent job at classifying content. So Google created a way for sites to tag the kind of content they have. Pretty much any search engine would need the same kind of mechanism.
And content providers are always going to be incentivized to be the top search result, which means targeting search algorithms. That's just the nature of the beast.
If there were multiple SEO implementations, that just means more work to target multiple algorithms. And the content owners with more resources, hundreds of developers, would ultimately win because they can target every algorithm.
I really don't see how Google as a "monopoly" changes these basic fundamentals.
If there were multiple sources of traffic, the pressure to optimize to one source would be lower, and the disruption caused by algorithm changes would be muted. Which would mean more interesting content less driven by a narrow set of metrics
Except nothing else actually does meaningfully better than Google, even with Google being the only thing sites care about optimizing for.
It's incredibly difficult to do a useful search if sites are hostile and doing everything possible to muddy the results.
That's the rationale Google uses. "We're the best, that's why users pick us." They built a moat of investment in search and the browser that other companies can't compete with. But as a consumer, I am not willing to accept that argument. Ma Bell claimed the same thing. We're a lot better off economically in a world where Ma Bell was broken up, and Microsoft was forced to stop their anticompetitive activities. Google will be better off as separate companies, worth more than the sum of its parts
None of this is relevant to the fact that your claim isn't even the weakest of weak evidence for your position. It is literally completely unconnected. SEO is a problem because searching through adversarial data inputs is not a problem anyone has shown any capacity to solve.
And Google's search engine is a singular product. There is nothing to break it off from. Its position is exclusively the product of the fact that there is no other option that's remotely functional. Search is hard and no one else even has developed even a mildly interesting alternative.