ad clicks have always been more important than quality search results
Whatever else you might think about what Google is doing, this is certainly not true.
Google gained dominance precisely because its search results were vastly superior to any other. I was a web developer even back then, and clearly remember trying to struggle with the results of Yahoo or AltaVista or DogPile, etc. There's just no question that Google won because of higher quality results.
And at that time there was also a lot of controversy about their competitors selling search positions, so you could outright buy the #1 slot, for example. Google never did this, and always maintained a policy of maintaining a clear distinction between organic results versus ads. The line may have become less bright over time, but it's always been possible to discern which items on the results page were "real" and which weren't.
You can criticize them for having decreasing commitment so they're not as bold about the ideals, but I don't think it's fair to say that they never cared, or even that they don't care anymore.
> And at that time there was also a lot of controversy about their competitors selling search positions, so you could outright buy the #1 slot, for example. Google never did this, and always maintained a policy of maintaining a clear distinction between organic results versus ads. The line may have become less bright over time, but it's always been possible to discern which items on the results page were "real" and which weren't.
They do exactly that on mobile, and if you watch non-geeks use Google they cannot reliably spot the ad versus the "natural" results. Hell, I tap the ad about half the time, because I'm in a hurry and don't look closely enough, and they've extorted the owner of whatever company I'm searching for to pay for their own name so the top result is an ad for the thing I obviously wanted to find anyway.
seriously, the difference between google and everyone else was vast.
You had a lot of services that were literally amalgamations of all the other searches. They would would automatically go search 3, 4, 5+ other search engines because they all sucked in their own way.
And then google came along. Google was good enough that the approach of sifting through multiple search engines wasn't necessary. All those other search engines disappeared practically overnight. No one who experienced google would touch anything else.
google today might not be as technically superior anymore since we as a species understand the search space better, but at the time? google was absolutely game changing.
The days of Google's search engine ads being small text links off to the side of the search results page and the entire section clearly being labeled as ads are long gone.
Google literally sells the top spots on results pages to advertisers. Come on. A little notation many will ignore doesn’t make it not a sale of the top spot.
Whatever else you might think about what Google is doing, this is certainly not true.
Google gained dominance precisely because its search results were vastly superior to any other. I was a web developer even back then, and clearly remember trying to struggle with the results of Yahoo or AltaVista or DogPile, etc. There's just no question that Google won because of higher quality results.
And at that time there was also a lot of controversy about their competitors selling search positions, so you could outright buy the #1 slot, for example. Google never did this, and always maintained a policy of maintaining a clear distinction between organic results versus ads. The line may have become less bright over time, but it's always been possible to discern which items on the results page were "real" and which weren't.
You can criticize them for having decreasing commitment so they're not as bold about the ideals, but I don't think it's fair to say that they never cared, or even that they don't care anymore.