Google completely wiped the floor with independent content publishers a few years ago; instead promoting websites that venture capitalists had (potentially) shared interests in.
I wrote about that here in my post ‘Google’s Move Kills Small Independents & Keeping Going…‘
This week Google have effectively won an important ruling in court where they won’t have to take the harmful action of breaking up its company. I’m not always a fan of forcing large companies to break up because after all, free market American capitalism is about competition and winning (at all costs) … but as I’ve grown older I’ve also realised that corporations are essential dead psychopaths with no real reason to do anything good for humanity … so there do need to be checks in place, and the anti-monopoly laws are a good start.
The legal case focused on the dominance in search of which, since we now know that Google are inherently biased and throttle any information which might give you a different perspective on things, is a major problem in trying to at least maintain a free and open society.
Google has done a great deal of good but seems to have got worse as a product over the years. It’s not just the preferential treatment to some topics, but it’s also how internet marketers have used it to try and sell you something at every corner. It’s difficult to find good well loved websites on Google that aren’t backed by highly profitable entities.
Anyway, because of the case, they don’t need to sell their Chrome Browser or break anything else up.
The main problem now though is the new Google AI summaries and the complete overhaul of the Google results service currently only available in the USA.
DMG Media, owner of MailOnline, Metro and other outlets, said AIO resulted in a fall in click-through-rates by as much as 89%, in a statement to the Competition and Markets Authority made in July.
This is an astounding drop, but not unexpected. The future for getting traffic through search for the average joe is going to be increasingly difficult. Of course, we may well see new attempts at search engines filling this gap as more people start realising Google isn’t helping the little guy anymore.
Social networks and communities will continue to be a good source of traffic for the independent publishers.
That’s all for now.
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