In February, the software engineer and blogger Dmitri Brereton wrote an essay titled "Google Search Is Dying" for his personal website. His two main arguments are that Google's advertising is messy and dominates the results page, while the actual search results are mostly junk sites that have been reverse-engineered to rank highly.
If you have never searched for something on Google and felt deeply dissatisfied by what it showed you, Brereton essentially argues, you are living in the Matrix. "What you don't realize is that you've been self-censoring yourself from searching most of the things you would have wanted to search," he writes. "You already know subconsciously that Google isn't going to return a good result."
