I have worked with multiple search engine companies through the last three decades. It was what my generation’s task was after the personal computer boom that was defined by the work of my father’s generation. (He was a systems engineer for IBM through the transition from “Big Iron” mainframe computers to desktop computers.) So over the years I’ve seen some fascinating technology advancements in how we author the web as web content creators, how we index it and serve it via search engines, and how we scale accessibility for original creative content bringing new audiences to it through web portals, apps and content aggregation tools.
Recently, I’ve been seeing a transition portended over a decade ago in a panel discussion about new advancements in spam filtering and search engine optimization. The panel featured the legendary Matt Cutts from Google who was their “head of web spam”. In that decade, anchor-text ranking that had defined the early “Page Rank” sorting on the search engine results page (SERP) was being shifted out of its early dominance in the launch stages of Google search. The strategy that had helped Google displace the dominance of Inktomi, Altavista, Hotbot, LookSmart and Excite as leading vendors of algorithmic web search was now becoming its greatest weakness. Search engine optimization (SEO) was polluting Google’s search pages with marketing spam. Matt attended the SEO conference to deliver the grim news of how he and his team was augmenting the SERP algorithmic weighting to suppress pages that he referred to as “made for advertising”. There was a booming cottage industry at the time where web design agencies would build webpages peppered with display ads, then get bloggers to link to those pages which artificially boosts the empty pages in Google's SERP. That practice was referred to as “search arbitrage” because the SEO practitioners were buying cheap Google clicks or even getting free backfill results hits, then redirecting visitors to a page with expensive display ads, pocketing the margin between the two kinds of ad spend. Matt wanted to shut this down because it forced Google customers to search twice to get to information they were originally seeking. So the diminishing of Page Rank algorithm as the leading factor in Google’s SERP meant that their customers could get to information from the indexed pages faster. Speed from Google search box to the originating page with the most relevant information was how Google saw its mission back then.
Many people at the SEO conference viewed Matt as the grim reaper for their ad spend and SEO marketing budget. This is because they were buying traffic cheaply on Google and earning so much on the arbitrage of the misdirection through other ad buys. This mattered a lot because Google powered the search results of the major internet traffic those days, Yahoo, AOL in the portal market and both Firefox and Safari web browsers. Matt was calmly attending all the SEO conferences, putting up on the big screen examples of search spam that everyone in the audience was creating, then telling them how bad this was for the experience of Google’s partners and customers, and explaining how he planned to gradually shift the weights to improve the landscape. But every time he spoke he was delivering bad news about how the people who received traffic through Google results previously were suddenly not going to be receiving that traffic or visibility. He was like the Federal Reserve Bank chairman delivering the bad news on inflation, which hurts everyone, announcing interest rate adjustments that hurt primarily borrowers in order to keep inflation in check. After Matt had left the stage, the champions of the SEO industry would
take the stage and have panel discussions about what web agencies and
advertisers could do to adjust to the new paradigm shifts. At that time Rand Fishkin was one of those panelists.
Rand had started a service called SEOMoz that would help small businesses navigate the complex ecosystem of search advertising and “organic search” which was the main product Google was selling as “backfill” to the major portals and app vendors of the day. I ended up having a very long discussion with Rand after the conference at the Googleplex. Google hadn't hosted the event. But they invited developers to their campus for an after party. Perhaps it was an attempt to assuage the bitter pill of Matt's message with a bit of lighthearted networking, exciting discussions on the good parts of what they planned to offer developers and content creators, and of course to encourage buying ads through their Adwords program.
I represented Yahoo's business development team at the time. Similar to Matt, I thought that search spam was the enemy of the “raw truth” of the web. It’s easy to see what my bias was at the time. I thought the web blogs and original content published by site hosts and discussion fora in that decade were the ultimate reason that people used apps like Firefox and Safari and portals like Yahoo and AOL. Web content allowed those sites and services to benefit by helping people find information fast. Sending customers bouncing through a pachinko-like game of redirects obfuscated the user’s journey and wasted their time. I saw the motive of SEO spammers to be purely for the purpose of reaping a small profit in making the user journey longer!
Rand argued that I should view it from a different perspective. Portals and search engines were the ones taking profit by directing traffic to the supposed raw web content by putting ads all around the gates to the search box. We, meaning Google and Yahoo, were the ones making the path less obvious to the user’s destination. He and his team were the ones helping the small businesses to navigate the path to customer discovery in world where the big boys in the game were trying to obfuscate the transparency of the web in the raw form that it had started in the 1990s.It is always good to take a stroll in someone else’s shoes to understand their motivations and the value of their opposing view of the landscape you see. So I took his insight on what he did for his customers to heart.
I remember on Rand’s panel at the SEO conference one of the other panelists, Bill Slawski, mentioned Google’s recently filed patent on website-summarization. Google’s oldest patents were of course going to expire in 17 years after publication. Anyone in the world could build off those patents as open source once they expired without owing royalties or licenses. (I wrote extensively about this in The Momentum of Openness, how the US patent system is a means to mass distribute proprietary ideas, over time, to lead to a booming economy of open innovation.) Google would need to differentiate itself over time from those copycats who would inevitably launch around the world once their patents were in the open commons and utilized everywhere by slow followers. What was the Google of tomorrow? You can see it in the patent filings of the current day, argued the panel.
Of particular note, which stuck with me to today, was the concept Rand teased out from this insight. What does it mean for Google to have a site-summarization patent if the platform would solely be to used to abstract everything from the “destination” site rendering all its information on the Google owned-and-operated page without the user ever clicking through to the content host? It would reshape the internet away from the 1990s web. Google was going to gradually cease being an arbitration layer for routing web traffic. It would become a destination and dictionary of all things visible on the web with nobody needing to visit the original authors.
Michael Kimball, an attorney I had the honor of working with at Yahoo back then, has written extensively about AI/LLMs and the concept of this aggregation of source material away from the authors via the new user interface, a chatbot that doesn't reveal its sources and doesn't pay authors their due as originating creators. In my early days in search, people would attribute the information to the vehicle of discovery, not the author. Search engines, social networks and portals were a kind of sleight of hand that would take advantage of a humans weakness of remembering context, something I'd heard described as "source amnesia". It was common for people to forget who said what where. But they can remember where they were when they heard it. So in those days it was common for people to say: Reddit told me …. Twitter told me …. Google told me….
And now we are at the materialization of the new obfuscation layer. The chatbot is the new sleight of hand method convincing us that an aggregate oracle of web insights can be abstracted from the original speakers and authors.
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| Source: Jake Angelo/Semafor via Yahoo Finance |
Alphabet had a much-publicized cash flow dip in its earnings last quarter, the first year that Google/Alphabet had negative cash flow in 22 years. It’s pretty obvious to most people why. The maturation of that old patent is the new face of the company. It will continue to be the web portal of the internet. But in this new era Google is moulting. It is shedding its original form that people used to call “The 10 blue links”. Many searches you conduct will not show you original web content. It will show you a Google Gemini authored abstraction of summaries from its former search index, presented on Google’s owned-and-operated web domains.
You will often see exactly what other tens of millions of people have seen on the keyword you entered. These summaries push any pay-per-click ads that were previously at the top of the SERP further down.
The patent that portended the end of traffic being routed to websites that Rand was warning about, is here. I recently saw Rand speaking on Bloomberg News about what he calls “Zero click search” as part of a book tour for his upcoming release. What are web content publishers to do in a world where nobody searches and lands on their websites? You can read more about his insights here, and pre-order his book on this trend here.
I only became an author and major blogger after meeting Rand at that fateful SEO conference that showed me the future of the web ecosystem. But I still think about his way of seeing the flow of content creation, content publishing and marketing from view of the little guy, which at this point is me.
(Disclosure: ncubeeight.com is hosted by Blogger, a free web publishing tool provided by Google. I do not serve ads on ncubeeight nor accept sponsorship. Google may display ads on your view of my pages to offset the cost of serving. I don't receive revenue from that. This post was not sponsored by Rand Fishkin, nor Google.)
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