“Houston, we have a problem.” It’s a phrase that has become synonymous with recognizing a crisis—a clear admission that something is wrong, and action is needed. Today, I can’t help but think that Google Search, once and still the definitive and most popular gateway to the world’s information, is now facing its own “Houston” moment. Like NASA’s astronauts realizing that their mission was in peril, Google too must acknowledge that its golden age may be ending. The writing on the wall is becoming clearer, and the crisis brewing is not one of technology alone, but of relevance, trust, and the evolution of how we search and connect with information.
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History of Search Engines
I see the history of search engines as the story of human curiosity—a relentless quest to find, organize, and make sense of information in an ever-expanding digital universe. The first ever search engine, Archie, emerged from a need to index file names in a vast sea of FTP servers in the early 1990s. It wasn’t sophisticated; it was a filing system more than an answering machine, but it was a gateway into the unknown. Archie led to others, like Veronica, Jughead, and eventually Yahoo!, which began categorizing the web—a World Wide Web that had just been spun by Tim Berners-Lee.
In those early days, search engines were as clunky as the internet itself. The web was chaotic, an unmapped galaxy of websites held together by blue hyperlinks, and search engines struggled to make sense of it. You entered keywords into a void and hoped for something useful. What mattered to you then was not just finding information, but the simple act of discovering that someone, somewhere, had the information online you desperately sought.
When Google Became the Internet’s Gatekeeper
Larry Page and Sergey Brin were part of this era, diving into the mess of unstructured data, and out came Google search or simply Google. What made Google search brilliant was how it looked at hyperlinks instead of just keywords on a web page. Brin and Page saw hyperlinks as votes of confidence, signals of trust and importance in the online world. The more hyperlinks (backlinks) a website had, the more popular and trustworthy it was to Google search. By treating these hyperlinks (backlinks) as endorsements, Google search became the most popular compass for navigating your way around the big virtual maze we call the internet. Other search engines, stuck in the mire of keyword-stuffing and metadata abuse, simply couldn’t match the precision of Google’s approach—one where authority mattered more than keywords. You no longer had to wade through irrelevant results; you found what you were looking for, and Google thrived because of it.
Their aim? A noble one: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible. Like Tim Berners-Lee’s dream of an interconnected world, Page and Brin wanted a universe of knowledge—free, accessible, and perfectly indexed. They even called their first search engine “BackRub,” a playful nod to how backlinks held the web together. Imagine that—BackRub could have been the name instead of Google! But soon, their ambitions outgrew the whimsical name. They chose “Google” instead, a wordplay on “googol”: 10 to the power of 100. It was fitting. They didn’t just want to search the world wide web; they wanted to organize it—a task as colossal as counting to infinity.
Yet here’s the irony: Back in 1998, I find it fascinating that Larry Page and Sergey Brin, still unknown in the tech world, offered to sell Google to AltaVista for just $1 million. They just wanted to return to their studies at Stanford! The company they were trying to sell was based on the soon-to-be patented PageRank system, the very core of what would become Google search. AltaVista turned them down, not realizing the future potential. Yahoo also missed out, preferring to keep users on their own platform rather than embracing PageRank’s model of directing users to the most relevant websites on the internet. Their mission was grand, but their vision was raw, not driven by profit. In the beginning, Google wasn’t about ads or pay-per-click. It was about the purity of search.
But then came the breakthrough—PPC, or Pay-Per-Click advertising. I imagine the lightbulb moment must have been the realization that if Google could index all the content on the web, it naturally created perfect competition to be at the top. It was like putting all the rats in one big box and dropping a piece of cheese—the cheese being the coveted first spot on Google’s first page. Those who practiced SEO fought tooth and nail to get on Google’s first page, but with search ads, companies could simply compete to be at the top of the top page! Suddenly, everyone wanted to be the rat that got the cheese, and Google was the one holding the box. It wasn’t just SEOs and marketers clamoring to reach the top—you had companies willing to pay to jump the queue. Suddenly, a business model emerged that could sustain Google’s indexing ambitions. You didn’t have to have the best backlinks; if your ad was relevant and your pockets deep enough, you could leapfrog everyone else. The rest is history: this was all possible because Google acquired a company called Applied Semantics back in in 2003, which played a pivotal role in shaping what would become the AdSense and Google Ads program—a critical piece in their PPC advertising puzzle. I think it’s one of those turning points where you realize just how smart their strategy was. Applied Semantics specialized in semantic text processing, which is basically a way for computers to understand the meaning of words and sentences like a human would, and their technology allowed Google to deliver highly relevant ads by understanding website content in a more human-like manner. This acquisition not only laid the groundwork for AdSense but also catapulted Google into becoming the dominant player in online advertising. Search had truly become their golden goose.
The trillion-dollar valuation of Google is built on one thing: attention. Unlike the traditional economies that you and I know, where money is the currency and the more money you have, the wealthier and higher up the food chain you are, on the internet, attention is the real currency. Imagine it this way: the more attention you gather, the more influence and power you hold in this digital economy. It’s like playing a poker game where the chips are not dollars but people’s attention. The more attention you can command, the more bargaining chips you have when sitting at the traffic poker table of the internet. Companies and creators alike strive to get your attention because, just like money in a traditional economy, it determines who gets the power and the opportunities. Google gets a billion searches each day! That means they can charge an arm and a leg for the magic of being able to put someone’s product or service in front of you at the moment you search for it. The “Blue Ocean” of the early days of search engines—when Gary Vaynerchuk could buy search ads for his dad’s “Wine Library” for cents per click—eventually turned into a bloody “Red Ocean” as competition intensified, and thus costs, skyrocketed. Today, insurance companies in America pay over $50 per click just to advertise on Google Search! Think about that—$50 could easily pay for a two-night stay in a beautiful Airbnb apartment somewhere near the beach in Cape Town, South Africa. But on Google search, that $50 is just for a single click—a click with no guarantee that it will ever convert into a sale.
Now imagine you’re a small business owner, already struggling to keep the lights on and pay your employees. Every dollar matters. Spending $50 on a click, without any certainty of a return, is like gambling with money you can’t afford to lose. It’s throwing cash into the wind, hoping it somehow lands in a place where it will grow.
For a small business, that’s not just risky—it’s terrifying. The stakes are enormous, and the risk can be crushing. It’s no surprise that small businesses stay away from Google search ads—they simply can’t afford to play in this high-stakes game, where only those with deep pockets have a chance to thrive.
The Google search landscape has turned into a red ocean—a place of fierce competition not just for advertisers, but also for content creators who depend on SEO to get noticed. Google search has become a giant red ocean for both advertisers and content creators who rely on SEO to get organic traffic. Google’s mission to organize the world’s information had become muddled by its ambitions to keep its shareholders happy.
Mobilegeddon
And then came the shift to mobile. Google, seeing the future in our pockets, cleverly acquired Android Inc. in July 2005 for at least $50 million. Suddenly, Google services were everywhere, and I remember how seamless it felt at first. But the thing with mobile phones, unlike Desktop PCs, the mobile screen real estate was small and precious—and Google was eager to claim as much as possible for itself. Ads dominated those small screens. Organic search results were pushed further and further down (below-the-fold), and soon the purity of Google’s original mission—organizing the world’s information—began to fray. They crowded the search results with ads their own services—Google Maps, Google Shopping—to the point that even regulators took note. Ben Thompson of Stratechery captured this well in an article that Google had shifted their goals and mission; instead of helping you find what you needed and move on, they wanted to keep you within their ecosystem. And you felt it—you could sense the difference.
This wasn’t the same Google that had once wowed us by delivering exactly what we needed when we searched for it. It became, instead, a maze. A walled garden where the goal wasn’t discovery but consumption—by being pushed to clicking on their search ads and Google services. The tipping point came when it became harder to distinguish where the ads ended and the organic results began. Your internet journey wasn’t about learning anymore; it was about monetizing your search experience in its entirety. Searching on Google had, in a sense, become an exercise in navigating around Google itself. And if you’ve used it recently, I’m sure you’ve felt the frustration of sifting through ads to find what you actually need. And don’t get me started about Ads on YouTube, another Google’s owned company.
The problem Google now faces is one it helped create. As a publicly listed company, it must grow and keep on growing! But the price of growth has been the erosion of trust in the relevance of its search results. With mobile search, Google doubled down on its control, prioritizing ad slots and its own properties over the rest of the web—even resulting in fines from the EU. It’s reminiscent of a corporate titan that becomes too focused on the rear-view mirror—watching competitors like Amazon, TikTok, or Reddit who have now become primary search engines in their own rights for different types of queries. People searching for products now turn to Amazon first. Gen-Z users start their curiosity quests on TikTok and Snapchat. Reddit threads often provide more insight than Google’s featured snippets.
The Rise of AI: A New Era Dawns
And then there’s AI. We are now at the beginning of what I like to call ‘the age of botification,’ or ‘Software 4.0,’ the next big leap in how we use software. Under Software 1.0, you had to type commands to tell the software program what to do—think of it as teaching a stubborn robot step by step (thank goodness I wasn’t around then!). Then came Software 2.0, thanks to Xerox’s invention of the mouse. Suddenly, we had a GUI—Graphical User Interface—where you could point and click at icons. Your software came on a disk, and all you had to do was install it and start using it. Simple, right?
Fast forward to Software 3.0, and you have the world-changing introduction of Apple’s App Store and appification of software which coincidentally also meant the death of the beloved BlackBerry. Now, software took on a new form—apps and became SAASy (software as a service) by living on the Internet itself while charging us monthly subscriptions. Software found a new home on the internet as apps, and suddenly there was an app for everything: weather apps, accounting apps, weight loss apps, meditation apps and even expensive wallpaper apps (Hi MKBHD!). You name it, there’s an app for it-yes, even an app to remind you to drink water and get up to move around! Apps became the new way we interacted with technology, and they were everywhere.
But here’s what many people don’t realize yet: with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, we are stepping into Software 4.0—a world where software and apps evolve into Ai chatbots or integrate chatbot functionality. The media is already flooding us with headlines about AI chatbots as if we’re preparing for a new kind of technological Noah’s Flood. And make no mistake—it’s coming. In the near future, you and I won’t just use software, we’ll chat with it. Software will be human again. Imagine being able to ask your accounting software to balance your books while you sip your coffee, or a personal AI agent that takes care of tasks autonomously. These are what the media calls AI Agents, and they are definitely going to replace certain human jobs-we might have to revisit the idea of a universal basic income sooner than later!
Where previous software iterations aimed to assist us, AI-driven chatbots are designed to engage, to become our collaborators. We won’t need to search in the traditional sense. Imagine a world where you could chat with an AI that helps you find what you need, understands your preferences over time, and delivers meaningful answers—all without the distraction of ads. Maybe you’ll pay a small subscription fee, but in return, you get an unbiased, dedicated digital and very clever assistant. Now tell me, wouldn’t that be a refreshing change?
Under software 4.0 think of Google as BlackBerry, with its beloved QWERTY keyboard (traditional search engine)—beloved until it wasn’t. In Shona, a Zimbabwean language (that I no longer speak fluently), they say “nyoka huru haizvirume”—a big snake does not bite itself. But in the corporate world, the opposite is what precisely happens. If we are to go by history, then big companies always end up eating themselves, think of BlockBuster, BlackBerry, etc – they focused on squeezing every drop of money out of their business models and missed the innovations and changes happening right under them in their own industries. To me, Google is that big Python that will eventually end up eating itself. The insistence on squeezing every dollar from search at the expense of relevance has left a sour taste in our mouths and internet experience. And when you lose the trust of users, like you and me, as BlackBerry did when it failed to adapt to touchscreens, you risk losing them forever. Google has become so fixated on monetization and competition that it risks choking the very search experience that made it indispensable to navigating the internet.
Babylon’s Fall: A Warning for Google
History tells us that Babylon, once a great empire, fell in the midst of celebration and revelry. They were feasting, drinking, and toasting to their own invincibility when an ominous sign appeared—the writing on the wall. It wasn’t written by human hands; it was an invisible force, an unseen warning. Babylon was overconfident, and the leaders were blind to the danger that was quietly closing in on them. As they raised their goblets in joy, their empire was already crumbling from within.
This is how I see Google today. Google Search has grown into a behemoth, a modern-day Babylon whose revenues continue to climb while its dominance tightens. Internally, Google—now Alphabet—is stretched in many directions: the Pixel phone, AI initiatives like generative AI (Gemini), battling Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud, and navigating Google Search versus AI search. And soon, they may be facing antitrust cases. Like Babylon, Google’s empire is vast, but it risks being weakened by its overextension and internal strife.
They are celebrating their ad revenue and expanding their market share, but they seem to ignore the invisible warning—the writing on the wall that AI is bringing. Just like the unseen hand that wrote Babylon’s fate, the next big shift in search will not come from traditional human-made search engines; it will come from AI, an invisible force that’s already here, reshaping how we access information.
AI is Google’s writing on the wall. While Google revels in its increasing profits, boasting record ad revenues as advertisers compete fiercely for that coveted first-page spot, it risks missing the signs of change that are quietly but swiftly unfolding. The unseen hand of artificial intelligence is drawing the future, one that moves away from traditional search engines entirely. This future belongs to conversational AI—chatbots and digital assistants that don’t just help you search, but help you find, intelligently and intuitively.
The next big search engine won’t be a product of algorithms tweaked by human engineers—it will be AI-driven, built to engage and understand users at a deeper level than Google ever could. Just as the writing on the wall wasn’t human, but a divine omen for Babylon’s end, AI represents an external, inevitable force that Google cannot control. The feast may continue, the profits may still rise, but if they ignore the writing, Google Search, like Babylon, may soon find that their reign is over.
Full Circle: The End of the Beginning
Google’s story began with a dream—to organize the world’s information and make it accessible to all. Today, that dream feels clouded by ads and profit motives. The irony is palpable: the company that once disrupted the status quo now finds itself at risk of disruption.
As we enter the age of conversational AI, we are witnessing the next great leap in the story of curiosity. From Archie to AI, the journey has come full circle—not just indexing information, but connecting us to it meaningfully. The death of Google search is not the end of discovery; it is the beginning of something profoundly human.
The future won’t be built on ten blue links on a first page out of a gazillion search results. It won’t even start with a search bar. The AI age is already here, botification age has begun and software, wearing chatbots’ cloak is conversational and very smart. Soon, we will pay for AI bots that help us navigate the complexity of the web without ads, without noise, and without Google’s choking grasp. The journey that used to start with a Google search may soon begin with a conversation—not with a person, but with an intelligent, unbiased chatbot. And I think that’s where we’re heading.
And perhaps that’s not a bad thing. The story of search began with curiosity, and I believe it’s evolving—no longer just about indexing information, but about intelligently interpreting it for you and me. It started with Archie, and it may end with AI (ChatGPT search or Perplexity AI or some random startup about to take over the world!). Google search transformed from being a gateway into the unknown to a gatekeeper of monetization. The time has come for the journey to move beyond Google search—into an age where the goal is not just to find answers, but to connect with them meaningfully, personally, and without distractions. The future does sound scary, but at least, software will be human again!