this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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It was pretty neat when the internet was young and you could find just about anything known to man somewhere on the internet for free, and Google would even show you the sites that had whatever you were looking for instead of some megacorp product page that's possibly related. But the corpos didn't want that reality, they wanted this one.
From Day 1 Google's business model has been to show sponsored content before search results. You're probably thinking about the search engines before them.
I'm talking about Google before they prioritized products pages and news corporations. When was the last time that you saw some small abstract site with the exact information you were looking for in the results on the first page? That used to be commonplace. Ads have always been on top, but that was only the first 1-2 listings & possibly some on the side, but the rest was sorted by relevancy, not by size and budget.