What Google Search Isn't Showing You

When I recently Googled "best toaster" on my phone, thinking about replacing the appliance in my apartment kitchen, the search immediately yielded a carrousel of images of products from various high-design brands: Balmuda, Hay, Smeg. Lower down on the results page were ads for online retailers such as Amazon and Wayfair, then another carrousel of "Popular Toasters" with user-review metrics, then a list of suggested queries under the heading "People also ask." ("Is it worth buying an expensive toaster?" "You can't gain much beyond the $100 models," says an answer pulled from CNET.) Swiping down further, I reached aggregated listicles clearly designed to exploit Google's search algorithm and profit from affiliate marketing: toaster tips from Good Housekeeping, the "4 best toaster ovens of 2022" from Wirecutter. Further down still was a map of toasters that could be purchased in physical proximity to my apartment. I felt lost among the suggestions, awash in information and yet compelled by none of it. This kind of cluttered onslaught of homogenous e-commerce options is what recently prompted Dmitri Brereton, a twenty-six-year-old engineer at a recruiting-software company in San Francisco, to publish a blog post titled "Google Search Is Dying."