Ten years on, however, Google is facing its own problems. Growing concerns over privacy, copyright and censorship issues grab the headlines, but they serve as a disguise for a deeper malaise: the increasing corporatization and predictability of Google's search results. In many ways the market seems to be turning full circle, arriving back at a position where even Google's results no longer reflect the true needs of its users.
Ironically, this is the direct outcome of the very technology that transformed searching in the first place. On the essentially level playing field that was the Web in 1998, Google's technology served to reinforce a fundamental democracy, where content and its inherent quality wielded significantly more power than either scale or financial power. But as corporations have tightened their control over the Web, Google's strategy has started to look dated, serving the needs of those corporations, suppliers of goods and services, at the expense of what many users are really looking for. Not everybody who uses the Web is trying to buy something, but in the Google model, non-consumers are becoming increasingly disenfranchised under the weight of commercialization.
This is due to a number of factors. One is that the site optimizations necessary to obtain a high Google search ranking tend to require specialized knowledge or to cost a lot of money, which favors wealthier corporations whose sites therefore tend to be promoted towards the top of the listings. Another is the way in which the quantification of back links as an arbiter of quality tends to reinforce the high ranking of already popular sites, effectively creating a barrier that prevents new sites from improving their ranking. Given these factors, it is easy to see the extent to which Google's once-radical ranking methodology now serves to sustain the status quo.
Of course it's all very well to criticize Google, but this is a pointless exercise without being able to offer meaningful alternatives, either in terms of new search technologies that are less susceptible to corporate influence, or alternative search engines that more frequently meet user requirements than corporate ones.
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