"The search engine that ate the internet is now the internet's problem. Here's how the company that promised to organize the world's information ended up organizing the world into SEO spam."
I was there when Google was still mysterious.
Not literally, I wasn't a Stanford graduate in 1998, watching Larry Page and Sergey Brin demo their new algorithm on Gerhard Casper's name. But I was there in the early 2000s when searching felt like discovering something rather than being sold something. When you typed a query and got actual results. Not articles loaded with keywords. Not listicles designed specifically to trap your cursor. Not sponsored content masquerading as organic results. Actual, useful information.
That version of Google feels like it belonged to a different era. Which, of course, it did.
The Moment Everything Changed
I want you to imagine a specific technological breakthrough: an algorithm so elegant, so revolutionary, that it fundamentally restructured how information moves around the internet. It was called PageRank, named originally after its co-creator Larry Page but also because it ranked pages based on the links they received from other authoritative pages.
The genius of PageRank was its simplicity. If other reputable websites linked to your content, Google would treat you as reputable too. It was democratic in theory, the internet voting with its links. Whoever had the most support rose to the top.
Google launched in 1998 and initially felt like the internet's greatest gift. It was minimalist. It was fast. It actually worked. In a world of bloated search engines like AltaVista that had tried to become portals and entertainment destinations and failed, Google stayed laser-focused on one thing: finding relevant information.
For the first time in internet history, there was a search engine you could actually trust.
But here's the thing about elegant systems: they only stay elegant until someone figures out how to game them. And that's when everything started to get weird.
Google Bombing and the First Cracks
The term "Google bombing" was coined in April 2001 by Adam Mathes, a product manager who would later work at Google itself. The concept was beautifully simple and deeply troubling: if you could artificially create enough links to a webpage, you could make it rank for completely unrelated search terms.
Mathes demonstrated this by getting the phrase "talentless hack" to return his friend's website. But he wasn't actually the first to figure this out. A humor site called Hugedisk.com pulled it off earlier, hijacking search results for "dumb motherfucker" to make it point to a pro-George W. Bush merchandise site.
When Google responded, they called it "an anomaly." But it wasn't an anomaly. It was a preview.
What was happening was the first battle in what would become a 25-year war: users trying to manipulate Google, and Google trying to stop them. Except Google would lose this war, not because they didn't have the technical capacity to win it, but because they stopped caring about winning it and started caring about monetization instead.
The Golden Age Nobody Realizes Is Ending
You have to understand what Google was like in the early 2000s to understand what happened next.
Philipp Lenssen ran a gaming website called Games for the Brain. For three years, he got basically no traffic. Then suddenly, almost overnight, Google started sending him visitors. "It was just not doing anything," he recalled. "And then, suddenly, it was a super popular website."
This wasn't luck. Lenssen had optimized his site for the search terms people were actually using. He understood PageRank, understood backlinks, and understood how Google worked. And instead of being manipulative about it, he was authentic. His site was actually about brain games. Google sent him relevant traffic. Everyone won.
Lenssen became one of the web's most prominent chroniclers of Google through his blog Google Blogoscoped, running from 2003 to 2011. He represents an entire generation of early web creators who felt like Google was on their side. The company was launching Google Groups, Google Calendar, Google News, Google Reader. Each tool felt like it was built to make the internet better, to democratize publishing, to help people create and discover content more easily.
"Everything was done really intelligently, very clean, very easy to use, and extremely sophisticated," said Andy Baio, one of the early web pioneers who still blogs at Waxy.org. "And I think that Google Reader was probably the best, like one of the best, shining examples of that."
Google Reader. Let me say that name again because it matters. Google Reader was a tool launched in 2005 that let you subscribe to RSS feeds from across the web and read them all in one place. If Google Search was the spine of 2000s internet culture, Google Reader was the central nervous system.
"Everybody I knew was living off Google Reader," remembered Scott Beale of Laughing Squid.
The bloggers and early web creators of that era felt like Google got it. They weren't adversaries. They were partners. By optimizing their content for PageRank, they weren't being manipulative; they were helping Google understand which content was actually valuable. And in return, Google sent them readers and helped them build audiences. It was a virtuous cycle.
"They were encouraging people to write on the web," Baio said. That was the feeling.
The Moment It All Shifted
Everything changed in 2003 when Google launched AdSense.
Anil Dash, one of the web's earliest bloggers, pinpoints this moment as the turning point. He remembers it vividly. Before AdSense, you could have open comment sections on websites and they'd mostly stay clean because there was no financial incentive to spam them. You couldn't make money from it.
"Then instantly, overnight, what happened?" Dash said. "Every single comment thread on the internet was instantly spammed."
AdSense gave links a monetary value. And once links had monetary value, the entire relationship between creators and Google fundamentally changed. It was no longer about creating good content that people would naturally link to. It was about gaming the system to get those links, because those links literally paid your bills.
"At that point it was really clear where the next 20 years were going to go," Dash said.
From that moment forward, Google cared less about the health of the wider internet and more about the health of its own advertising network. Creators stopped being partners in building a better web and started being competitors fighting for position in Google's results. And Google's incentive shifted from "make the best search engine" to "make search work well enough that we can keep selling ads against it."
How We All Got Tricked Into Ruining the Internet
Somewhere between 2003 and now, SEO became an industry standard. Not because it's evil, though it absolutely became perverted into something much closer to evil, but because it worked. If you wanted people to find your content, you needed to optimize for Google.
The problem is that optimizing for an algorithm and optimizing for human readers are not the same thing.
Take recipe sites as the perfect example. Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen was one of the earliest food bloggers. She started in 2003 and has since published three books. In the beginning, she didn't think much about Google. But eventually, like everyone else online, she noticed that her page ranking affected whether people could find her content.
"It was definitely something you were aware of, your page ranking, just because it affected whether people could find your stuff through Google," she said.
Today, food blogs have become a standardized format: an extremely long personal anecdote (often filled with ads), followed by a recipe card. This isn't because food bloggers are inherently bad writers. It's because Google rewards pages with more words, more internal links, more engagement signals. Writers caved to formatting pressures not because they wanted to, but because following SEO guidelines meant their content would actually get seen.
"Rather than writing because there was maybe a story to tell, there was this idea that it was good for SEO," Perelman acknowledged. "And I think that that's a lower quality experience."
This happened across the entire internet. URLs got bloated with keywords that don't read naturally. YouTube video titles became clunky and awkward. Instagram influencers started adding dozens of hashtags at the bottom of captions. TikTok creators started using #fyp (for you page), hoping the algorithm would notice.
We all collectively agreed to write for robots instead of people.
The Death of Discovery
You start to see the problem when you realize what Google killed to make room for all this optimization.
Google Answers closed in 2006. Google Reader, the central nervous system of the early web, was shut down in 2013. That closure marked the functional death of the blogosphere. Without a hub for aggregating blogs, publishers moved to Facebook and Instagram where they could reach audiences more directly. The open web became increasingly fragmented.
Search inside Google Groups repeatedly broke over the years. Blogger technically still exists but functions as a zombie service, underfunded and largely abandoned.
Meanwhile, the websites that did survive adapted. They optimized. They added keywords. They changed formatting. They became less about being interesting and more about being findable.
And slowly, imperceptibly, Google Search got worse.
Deb Perelman can see it clearly now. "Google has gotten shittier and shittier," she said. And almost everyone who was there in the early days agrees. The results are spammy. They're keyword-stuffed. You have to scroll past three sponsored results and two AI-generated summaries to find what you're actually looking for.
The search engine that was supposed to solve information overload became the thing that created it. The algorithm that was supposed to surface quality became the thing that buried it under layers of optimization and spam.
The Recursive Trap
Here's where it gets really dark: there's a recursive trap at the heart of all this.
Thousands of creators are searching for "SEO tips" on Google. The results that appear at the top of Google are... heavily SEO-optimized content. So they're following advice from sources that are themselves proof that the advice works (sort of). But that advice is largely superstition and guesswork.
Danny Sullivan, who has been the world's de facto expert on search since the early 2000s and now works for Google as their official search liaison, acknowledges this. Most SEO advice is pointless. Most of the "tricks" people find by searching "how to rank higher on Google" aren't accurate. The subject is "rife with superstition."
But here's the thing: even though the advice is often wrong, people are following it anyway. And when thousands of creators follow the same bad advice, it changes what the internet looks like. Food blogs all have the same format. Product reviews all hit the same word count. All articles use the same paragraph structure. Everything starts looking like it was generated by the same algorithm because it was optimized for the same algorithm.
Isn't that, in some fundamental way, Google shaping how human beings create content?
The Chicken and Egg Problem Nobody Can Solve
This is where things get philosophically messy. Did Google create the demand for this content, or does Google simply reflect what people are actually searching for?
The case study everyone points to is "All Your Base Are Belong To Us," one of the first real internet memes. It existed as an inside joke on message boards since 1998. But in February 2001, right after Google Groups launched, it suddenly exploded into the mainstream. It became one of the top search terms on Google that month.
Did Google make it go viral? Or did Google simply reflect that it was already going viral?
Sullivan, the Google search expert, argues it's the latter. "I just can't think of something that I did as a Google search that caused everybody else to do the same Google search," he said. "I can see that something's become a meme in some way. And sometimes, it could even be a meme on Google Search... But search itself doesn't tend to cause the virality."
But that's not necessarily true. When Google Groups added better discoverability to Usenet and message boards, that discoverability created word-of-mouth interest, which led to search interest. And then Google's placement amplified the trend further. The causality goes both ways.
It's like watching dominoes fall and arguing that the first domino didn't cause the others to fall, it just happened to be what was already going to fall anyway.
Alice Marwick, a communications professor who studies internet culture, puts it differently: "Google has gotten shittier and shittier... To me, it just continues the transformation of the internet into this shitty mall. A dead mall that's just filled with the shady sort of stores you don't want to go to."
The Playbook Google Didn't Learn From
Twenty-five years ago, AltaVista was the dominant search engine. It was praised for it's sophisticated technology. It was on top of the heap. And then it faced an existential threat from a young upstart company with a better idea.
Instead of doubling down on making search better, AltaVista became a portal. It bloated itself with services that worked less and less well. Its CEO admitted in 2002 that they "tried to become a portal too late in the game, and lost focus." They said they'd refocus on search. They never regained the lead.
Google is now following the exact same trajectory. It's gotten distracted by AI chatbots. It's bloated with services that don't work well. Search itself has become a vehicle for other products rather than the core product. The results are increasingly compromised by spam and optimization.
And now a young upstart company, OpenAI with ChatGPT. has created a fundamentally different way of finding information. Something that doesn't rely on links or keywords or optimization. Something that just... answers questions.
The Slow Death of Discovery
The real tragedy isn't that Google's search results got worse. It's that it fundamentally changed what the internet could be.
In the early 2000s, the discovery was serendipitous. You could stumble onto blogs. You could follow links from one interesting site to another. You could subscribe to feeds and see what creators you trusted were reading. There was a sense that the internet was full of surprises, full of genuine human creativity and weirdness that couldn't be categorized or optimized.
Now everything is either optimized for search or locked behind social media algorithms or buried so deep you'll never find it. The open web became a highway designed for robots. The weird corners got paved over.
We're left with a landscape that's increasingly sterile, increasingly repetitive, increasingly designed for monetization rather than discovery.
And the worst part? We did this to ourselves. We optimized our content for Google. We changed how we wrote and created and thought because Google rewarded certain behaviors and punished others. We collectively decided that being findable mattered more than being interesting.
What Happens When the Spiders Wake Up
The final irony is that Google is now facing competition from AI systems that don't care about any of this.
ChatGPT doesn't search Google results; it was trained on internet content, but it generates its own answers. It doesn't care about keywords. It doesn't care about backlinks. It doesn't care if your site is SEO-optimized. It just generates responses based on patterns in the data it learned from.
Which means all those years of optimizing content for Google might have been practice for optimizing it for AI. Except now the rules are even more opaque and even harder to game.
Thousands of creators are going to start optimizing for AI the same way they optimized for Google. And the internet is going to get worse in new and different ways.
We'll have killed what made Google useful in the process of optimizing for it. And then we'll do the same thing to whatever comes next.
The Ghost of Gerhard Casper
It all started with a search for "Gerhard Casper," the name of a Stanford president. In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin used it as their demo search to prove that Google worked better than AltaVista. It returned actual information about the person instead of results for "Casper the Friendly Ghost."
It was such a perfect metaphor for what Google was supposed to do: cut through the noise and find what you actually wanted.
Twenty-five years later, if you search "Gerhard Casper" on Google, you get actual information about Gerhard Casper. The algorithm works. But to get there, you probably scroll past three sponsored results, an AI summary that may or may not be accurate, a Wikipedia result that's usually helpful, and a dozen results from sites that mention "Gerhard Casper" only because they're SEO-optimized to show up for random searches.
The algorithm still works. But now it's surrounded by so much optimization and garbage that you have to work to find the signal beneath the noise.
Google didn't kill itself. We did. We optimized it to death.
And now we're about to do the same thing to whatever comes next.
The only question is whether anyone will learn the lesson this time around.
Spoiler alert: they won't.
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