You’ve probably noticed it by now. You search for a specific product review, a niche hobby, or even a local news story, and you get the same five giant websites. Every. Single. Time. Honestly, it's just a shame that's all that ever seems to surface on the first page of Google or inside your Discover feed. It feels like the internet has shrunk.
We used to have a sprawling digital wilderness of blogs, forums, and independent experts. Now? We have a sanitized mall. If it’s not a Reddit thread, a Forbes listicle (written by someone who has never touched the product), or a massive legacy media outlet, it might as well not exist. This isn't just a minor annoyance for power users; it is a fundamental shift in how human knowledge is indexed and shared. The "open web" is starting to feel like a walled garden where the walls are built by algorithmic preferences for "authority" over actual expertise.
Why the Search Results Feel So Empty
The problem isn't that people stopped writing great things. Far from it. People are still out there crafting incredibly detailed guides on 19th-century woodworking or the nuances of mechanical keyboards. The issue is that Google’s current ranking systems—especially the Helpful Content Update (HCU) and subsequent core updates in 2024 and 2025—have leaned so heavily into "brand authority" that small players are getting wiped off the map.
Google’s "EEAT" (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) was supposed to stop spam. Instead, it became a moat for the giants. If you’re a solo blogger with twenty years of experience in gardening, Google might still rank a 500-word blurb from a major lifestyle magazine over your 3,000-word masterpiece simply because the magazine has a higher Domain Authority.
It’s a feedback loop. Big sites get the traffic, which gives them more backlinks, which tells Google they are "authoritative," which gets them more traffic. Meanwhile, the actual expert—the person who knows the soil pH requirements for rare hydrangeas—is buried on page six. It's just a shame that's all the algorithm cares about lately: who is biggest, not who is best.
The Rise of the "Parasite SEO" Problem
You’ve seen this, even if you didn’t know the name for it. You search for "best VPN" or "best credit card," and you see an article on a reputable news site like Outlook India or The Daily Mail. Why is a news site from halfway across the world giving you tech advice?
It’s called Parasite SEO. Massive sites "rent out" subfolders to third-party marketers who pump out low-quality affiliate content. Because the main domain is trusted by Google, this subpar content ranks instantly. This pushes down the actual enthusiasts who spend weeks testing products. It’s a cynical exploitation of the system, and until very recently, Google was surprisingly slow to fix it.
Even with the March 2024 core update specifically targeting this "site reputation abuse," the results remain cluttered. The "big brands" still dominate because they are "safe" bets for an AI-driven algorithm that is terrified of showing a user a dead link or a weirdly formatted amateur site.
Google Discover and the Death of Serendipity
Google Discover was marketed as a way to find things you didn't even know you were looking for. It was supposed to be a feed of your interests. But open it today, and what do you see? Usually, it's a mix of:
- Clickbait headlines from major tabloids.
- "New" stories that are actually three days old.
- The same three tech blogs talking about a minor iOS update.
- Endless "Evergreen" content that has been refreshed with a new date but no new info.
The "Discover" experience has become remarkably predictable. Because the feed relies so heavily on "freshness" and "entity associations," small creators who don't publish daily are rarely featured. To stay in Discover, you have to be a content farm. You have to churn. That leads to a massive drop in quality.
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We are losing the "weird" internet. Remember when you’d stumble upon a weirdly specific fan-site for an obscure 90s cartoon? Or a hobbyist’s diary about building a cabin? That stuff doesn't make it into Discover. Discover wants "High CTR" (Click-Through Rate). High CTR usually means sensationalism.
The AI Content Tsunami
We can't talk about search quality without mentioning LLMs. Since late 2022, the volume of content being published has exploded, but the value has cratered. Bots are writing for bots.
An AI generates a "comprehensive guide" on a topic. It looks perfect to Google's crawlers because it has all the right keywords and a logical structure. But it has no "soul." It has no "experience." It’s just a statistical average of everything else on the internet. When it's just a shame that's all we see in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), we are essentially looking into a hall of mirrors where AI is summarizing other AI summaries.
Google's response has been the "Search Generative Experience" (SGE). Now, instead of even giving you a link to a website, Google uses AI to summarize the answer at the very top. This is great for "What time is it in Tokyo?" It is devastating for "How do I fix a leaking pipe?" because the AI might miss a nuance that a human expert would have caught—and that expert now gets zero clicks for their trouble.
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The Human Cost of Algorithmic Narrowing
This isn't just about "SEO drama." It affects how we think. If the first ten results for any political, health, or social query are from the same five corporate entities, our perspective narrows. We lose the dissenting voice. We lose the fringe experimenter who might actually be onto something new.
Think about the "Review" space. If you want to buy a new camera, you want to hear from the guy who has used it for six months in the rain. But that guy’s blog is dead because he can't compete with the SEO team at a billion-dollar media conglomerate. So, you read a review written by someone who held the camera for two hours at a press event. You get a worse product because the information ecosystem is broken.
It's just a shame that's all we're left with—a filtered, processed version of reality designed to maximize ad impressions rather than provide the most "helpful" answer.
Is There a Way Back?
It’s not all doom. There is a growing movement of people looking for "Small Web" alternatives.
- Search Operators: People are increasingly adding "reddit" or "forum" to the end of their searches. They are literally bypassing Google's ranking algorithm to find human conversations.
- Curation Over Algorithms: Newsletters (like Substack) and private Discord servers are exploding. Why? Because people want a trusted human to tell them what’s interesting, not a black-box algorithm.
- Alternative Search Engines: Engines like Kagi (paid) or DuckDuckGo (privacy-focused) are gaining traction among power users who are tired of the "commercial" feel of Google.
The reality is that Google is in a "Red Queen's Race." They have to run faster and faster just to stay in place against the tide of AI spam. But in doing so, they’ve accidentally crushed the very creators who made the web worth searching in the first place.
Practical Steps for Information Seekers
If you're tired of seeing the same recycled content, you have to change how you consume the web. You can't rely on the "Discover" feed to give you the truth.
- Bookmark your favorite creators. Don't wait for them to show up in your feed. They probably won't. Go to their sites directly.
- Use RSS feeds. It's old-school, but tools like Feedly or NetNewsWire let you subscribe to specific blogs so you see everything they publish, not just what an algorithm thinks you'll click on.
- Search deeper. Go to page two or three. Use the "Before:[Year]" search operator to find content from before the AI explosion. For example, "best hiking boots before:2020" will give you human reviews that aren't influenced by current SEO trends.
- Support independent media. If you find a writer you love, sign up for their newsletter. Pay for their work if you can. If the "small web" isn't profitable, it will continue to disappear.
The internet is still a vast, incredible place. It’s just that the map we've been using—Google—has decided to only show us the highways and the tourist traps. To find the real stuff, you have to be willing to go off-road. Because it's just a shame that's all the main road offers anymore: a view of the same three billboards, repeated forever.
The next time you search for something and feel that pang of frustration at the blandness of the results, remember that the information is out there. It’s just being hidden. Reclaiming your digital experience starts with realizing that the "first page" is no longer a reflection of the best the internet has to offer—it’s just a reflection of who has the biggest budget to stay there.
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Stop scrolling the feed. Start hunting for the source.
Next Steps to Reclaim Your Search Experience:
- Install an "uBlacklist" extension: This allows you to permanently hide specific "content farm" domains from your Google search results so you never have to see them again.
- Audit your "Interested" settings: Go into your Google Account settings and look at the "Interests" Google has assigned to you for Discover. Delete the generic ones and see if the feed improves (though, honestly, it might not).
- Use specialized search: For academic topics, use Google Scholar. For code, use GitHub. For real human opinions, use site:reddit.com or site:stackexchange.com within your search query to force the engine out of its corporate comfort zone.
- Try "Marginalia": This is a search engine specifically designed to surface non-commercial, text-heavy, "old-school" websites. It’s a great way to remember what the web felt like before it became a giant shopping mall.