Google's original mission was to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". Google redefined how the internet works, so much so that few people remember what the internet was like before google. The early internet consisted of collections of home pages like yahoo that aggregated links; all content was curated because there was no other way to discover it.

Google fundamentally changed how we search for information by indexing and ranking everything. Their initial algorithm was simple, but their early success fueled the utopian ideal of allowing everyone in the world to access all the information they wanted. Google was a fantastic way to search the early internet, which was full of random individual pages, useful blogs, academic articles, and weird memes. Google even attempted to get the world's offline information to be searchable, scanning and uploading books and scholarly articles in either a quixotic quest to democratize information or a way to break into the book publishing and selling business, depending on the point of view.

Something has changed, however. As more people and more money moved onto the internet, developers and marketers realized that being the top of google searches was critical to making money. Some simply purchased ads or added relevant keywords to optimize SEO, but people are increasingly taking on an adversarial role with google. One current strategy is to lock meaningful content behind paywalls or account signups ala Quora, but the other top strategy is to flood google with low quality or misleading information to muddy the waters.

This isn't fundamentally different to the pre-internet days. Muddying the waters has been used to great success in the 20th century, and likely before then too. There's an entire satire about its success in America: Thank You For Smoking. What is new is the velocity and scale that it can take on today, and the financial incentives that make it so profitable.

To pick on the mattress industry, google has been flooded with fake paid reviews, blogs covered in referral links, and other low quality content. Technically the FTC requires that paid posts show a disclosure, but they're often elusive or missing. It requires an investigative journalist to decipher the web of sponsored content and misleading information. Thankfully mattresses aren't lethal like cigarettes, so real world harm is limited. Anyone searching for a mattress, however, quickly gets sucked into the vortex of fake reviews and sponsored content. This has led to the rise of review sites like Wirecutter just to wade through the mountains of bullshit. But as sleepopolis shows, even the review sites are subject to capture by the marketing industrial spam complex.

There are other far more nefarious uses for this strategy too. "Fake News" was the talk of the 2016 US Election, and it shows no signs of abating anytime soon. There are a variety of reasons that fake news is so successful, but it's also telling that running a fake news site can make money. It may have started as a method of trolling and earning advertising revenue, but it looks to be increasingly institutionalized as organizations realize how successful it is. For example, the fake fact checking account in the UK. In other alarming news, fake news made a prominent display in the Donald Trump impeachment hearings when Devin Nunes harassed a witness about fake news conspiracies. That should have rung alarm bells everywhere - a US congressman bringing up 4chan style allegations about Ukraine during what was otherwise a serious proceeding. It was yet another sign that online clickbait had crossed over and taken up residence in official halls of power.

This doesn't even get into the problems that will come when machine learning content takes off. The potential to generate millions of pages of fake news articles, fake videos, fake audio recordings, fake transcripts, is going to present a huge problem for political discourse.

All of this spells trouble for Google. Despite their forays into different products and businesses, their search business is the cash cow of the company. The increasing prevalance of fake news, misleading marketing, low quality spam, and misinformation puts Google in an unenviable position. Instead of just presenting what's on the internet, they're going to have to take an increasingly editorial role, and that's a risky position to be in. There are already politicians around the world calling for intervention in Google and accusing them of bias. Even if Google is extremely careful in what it shows and hides, there is no winning this game. So far Google's strategy (at least in the US) seems to be to prioritize established media companies to the point of drowning out everything else.

1. Facebook, Google accused of anti-conservative bias at U.S. Senate hearing
2. Google dismisses Brexiteer claims it favours pro-Remain news outlets, saying 'quality and relevance' dictate results

It's a similar story on the commercial front, even though that has gotten far less popular attention and fewer hand-wringing editorials. There are too many interested parties trying to promote their latest scams or junk. Google maps has already been overwhelmed by tens of thousands of fake businesses that are out to steal your money. And here's the tricky part: Google makes a lot of money from all these scams, just like they do from legitimate businesses.

So what does this mean for Google? Most likely continued commercial success, but increasingly dissatisfied users. They will be attacked alternatively for being overly paternalistic in protecting users from junk, and as dangerous for exposing users to misleading information. Google being Google, they will spend increasing amounts of engineering effort attempting to combat the problems with code, only to get burned in dramatic fashion.