I'm looking for a blog post/medium/substack sort of piece from the late 2010s about the decline in google search quality, but it seems to have been completely nuked off the face of the internet. I remember this starting to happen almost immediately after it went up, but it was findable for a while. Other people wrote about it even! I'm back, after a very long hiatus! With something that's been bugging me for ages.
Some time in the late 2010s, someone wrote a HUGE blog post/medium/substack sort of piece on the decline of google search quality. This was really in depth, and had something like 10 years of data gathered to demonstrate their point with citations throughout. It was basically research paper quality, and had tons and tons of graphs, a/b screenshot examples, etc. Not long after it got delisted from googles own results and written about by a few people on various popular sites(and posted on reddit etc), with short form summaries.
Now i've found a lot of articles that are basically SEO snot or opinion pieces about how "google sucks now", and i think i even found one or two that clearly vaguely reference/rip off this piece without linking to it. But i can't even find anything that links to it. I'm assuming if it's even still up, anything that did link to it gets deranked.
I've tried every alternative search engine, looking through my and friends old posts, chat/im/whatsapp/groupchat logs, everything i could think of and i can basically only find vaguely similar things or opinion pieces. I'm genuinely starting to wonder if legal action was involved to kill this piece, but i don't remember enough to try and find it on archive.org/is or something like that.
It's really been bugging me because it seems more relevant than ever, especially with the recent killed wired piece but even that in and of itself is basically an editorial. I want real examples and evidence to show people! This is such a super common topic in my circles that i've really been itching to find it.
Some time in the late 2010s, someone wrote a HUGE blog post/medium/substack sort of piece on the decline of google search quality. This was really in depth, and had something like 10 years of data gathered to demonstrate their point with citations throughout. It was basically research paper quality, and had tons and tons of graphs, a/b screenshot examples, etc. Not long after it got delisted from googles own results and written about by a few people on various popular sites(and posted on reddit etc), with short form summaries.
Now i've found a lot of articles that are basically SEO snot or opinion pieces about how "google sucks now", and i think i even found one or two that clearly vaguely reference/rip off this piece without linking to it. But i can't even find anything that links to it. I'm assuming if it's even still up, anything that did link to it gets deranked.
I've tried every alternative search engine, looking through my and friends old posts, chat/im/whatsapp/groupchat logs, everything i could think of and i can basically only find vaguely similar things or opinion pieces. I'm genuinely starting to wonder if legal action was involved to kill this piece, but i don't remember enough to try and find it on archive.org/is or something like that.
It's really been bugging me because it seems more relevant than ever, especially with the recent killed wired piece but even that in and of itself is basically an editorial. I want real examples and evidence to show people! This is such a super common topic in my circles that i've really been itching to find it.