by mike_hearn | 2025-05-29 19:32:01+00:00
It doesn't hinge entirely on that. There's a lot of ambient background context here too.

The idea Google is hostile to long tail indie content isn't exactly a groundbreaking claim, it's been obvious and widely discussed for years. They've been losing the original culture for a long time. Google circa 2000-2010 was very libertarian. It believed in a large decentralized web in which Google helped all users with all queries, without passing judgement. If it was obscure and you wanted it, Google would reliably surface it in the first page of results every single time. This was the Google that believed in the indie web so much it purchased Blogger.

Starting around 2010-2012 the rate at which they hired new grads went up quite sharply (I was there and saw it). The average level of experience dropped sharply. These recruits brought with them the new authoritarian politics of the university campus. Around 2015-2016 you start to see Google start to just openly engage in political activism, tossing the hard-won reputation for neutrality in the trash. Unfortunately, this new worldview was incompatible with the prior commitment to the indie web. Whereas the Google of Matt Cutts cared a lot about surfacing tiny sites, the new Google became highly suspicious of any content that wasn't from sources they deemed "reliable", "authoritative" etc [1]. They defined these terms to mean basically any large left-leaning source, without reference to objective metrics. Put simply: if it's on .gov, .edu or one hop removed then it's reliable, if it's not then it isn't.

This shows up in how easy it now is to find queries where Google gives you the exact opposite of what you're asking for, no matter how clearly you specify the search terms. This would have once been considered a high severity code yellow, now it's by design. The open web won out over AOL partly because old Google fostered it, but one gets the feeling that Google now views its child with disgust. Can you imagine Google purchasing Substack, as they once did with Blogger? It's unthinkable. They'd undoubtably view it as a hive of villainy and scum. In the event they did buy it the first thing they'd do is delete most of its content.

Unfortunately, you can't be both anti-misinformation and pro-open-web. These two things are irreconcilable. Either the world is complex and anyone might have insight to contribute, or it's simple and the right answer is always found via traversing a shallow hierarchy of trusted sources.

So: does your random indie travel blog "demonstrate expertise" or "authoritativeness" as defined by someone who has been through the Ivy League universities? No. Are these the sorts of sites that can eventually become big and a recognized source of authoritative expertise, given enough nourishment from the watering can of unbiased search? Yes! That's how the web grew to start with. But Google doesn't care anymore and with the loss of its primary patron the open web is in its twilight years. As the author says: he was invited to Google HQ to hear an apology, and also to be told nothing will change. The new web is no different to AOL except in minor technical details, because that's how the woke generation like it.

[1] e.g. https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/12395529?hl=en