I'm being a bit contrary, but: it sounds like 80% of your traffic was coming, for free, from Google. Is the claim here that if you killed SEO, some more equitable, consistent method of content propagation would spring up to take it's place? Because I have a feeling people - especially young people - are abandoning Google, but for more opaque, less equitable algos (like Tiktok).
Tl;dr Google is imperfect but for a while it was helping people find your site. I worry there are darker paths in our future.
That would have been a good excuse/explanation in the days before Chrome existed. But since Chrome is THE browser, users have a hard time escaping Google.
So, GP is right.
Windows is still the most popular desktop / laptop OS, and while it might come with a Chromium browser it defaults to Bing. Users who want Google search need to either change their browser settings, or install a new browser (two things this community claims that no average user would ever do on a platform where the default was Chrome and Google web search).
I know it's imperfect, I know it's getting worse, I know it's an obscenely profitable money making machine. But a lot of people seek it out because it's a functional product that (at least for me) is free and still outperforms the competition.
I don't want to like Google, but I'm not going to pretend the product sucks just because I'm unhappy with the business model and the decline in quality.
I've been using chromium and firefox side by side at work and play all day for abt 3 years now. Indistinguishable except chromium uses more memory and crashes and hangs. I get hundreds of tabs open in firefox for weeks and months. I reach about 50 before chromium gets lethargic.
I used to do this under ubuntu 18 and 20 with 32GB ram, now under win11 w 64.
I don't understand the Chrome reality distortion field.
I think that's a slightly orthogonal issue - I'm talking Google Search vs other search providers. I doubt there's a significant gap between Chrome and Chromium.
> Users who want Google search need to either change their browser settings, or install a new browser (two things this community claims that no average user would ever do on a platform where the default was Chrome and Google web search).
Did you miss the part where Google would directly advertise and ask if you wanted to use Chrome instead on Google's search page? Or how it would be bundled with every installer under the sun? Chrome isn't the most popular browser because we collectively decided it's the best. It's because they leveraged their position as the world's search engine and advertiser.
I've worked with tons of your average PC user. They don't even know what a browser is or what a search engine is. If Google asks them if they want to install Chrome, they will always answer yes because why not. It's Google.
Bing on windows does the exact same thing. M$ and Google have roughly equivalent resources and audience reach to push their product. Google still comes out on top because via both reputation and average use case it's quality is better than bings.
This is not likely to change unless OpenAI finds a way break the monopoly. It's the only currently existing search that can claim to be better than Google. Which is why Google is pushing Gemini so hard.
Tl;dr Google is imperfect but for a while it was helping people find your site. I worry there are darker paths in our future.