Think Excite, Lycos, Alta Vista and the rest of the gang.
From Motherboard:
While Everyone Was Watching
According to Pew, 87 percent of Americans use the internet, and 83 percent search with Google. If one of those hundreds of millions of Americans were to search for “watch” today, the very top result they will receive is probably a listing for the Apple Watch, a high-tech luxury timepiece that is not yet available to the public. The link leads to what is essentially a house ad for the product on Apple’s website.
We increasingly take this stuff for granted, but that listing actually makes a pretty incredible assumption—that the item that Google deems most pertinent to most people asking the internet for information about a “watch” is an upscale wristbound smartphone—that is made only more incredible by the fact it may be correct.
To me, that lone search result is a tiny SEO-fueled banner, a reminder of how deeply commercial the practical web has become, and how intrinsically assumed it is that we are all searching to shop. After “Apple Watch,” which, again, did not exist until today, Google’s results for “watch” directed me, in order, to Nordstrom’s, Overstock.com, Macy’s, and Amazon. The last regular result on the page is for Wikipedia, the only non-retailer to make the cut.
(Searches
for users in different locations with different search histories will
of course change the results, but we were able to replicate the largely
the same results in multiple US regions, in incognito mode, and on a
deep web browser. Google screenshot)
We can blame the algorithm: maybe more websites are actually linking to Apple Watch than anywhere else. Which, given the charter of gadget blogs to scrutinize its every design element in a barrage of search-optimized posts (my favorite might be “Apple Watch price and release date: Where to watch Tim Cook unveil iWatch”), seems eminently plausible. Apple, for its part, feeds that algorithm by erecting its signature big tent circus, hosting an event that the tech press can’t bear to pass up and offering it a stream of content ripe for repackaging.
Or maybe, today, the internet really does want to know about that Apple watch above all else, and Google is providing us the best possible service. Maybe, today, it’s objectively true that “watch” = “Apple watch.”
But searches are returning this trend across the board; for clothes, accessories, and personal implements—searching Google for “shoes” does not return a single non-retailer result on the first page. It’s shoe stores all the way down, from Zappos to Amazon. It is simply assumed that nobody is searching to learn about the history of shoes, or where shoes are made, or what it is that really makes a shoe a shoe. The logic that our chief aim is to consume is written directly into the engine’s DNA....MORE
