Google Is Our New God. Resistance, or Anything Else, Is Futile

We’re ashamed to present the second in our probably-one-part-was-enough series, What’s With This Internet Thing? In this hard-hitting episode, we meet Google, which promptly tries to sell us an Uninterruptible Power Supply, because it somehow knows that an earlier version of this article was destroyed by a sudden power outage, which is not disturbing at all. 

After lengthy and careful consideration of our options, we have decided to just capitulate entirely.  Pigs Gorge officially offers its unconditional surrender, and reverent devotion, to Google.  We assume our sleepy community will soon be occupied by jack-booted, skateboarding thugs wielding military-grade PixelBooks.  We’re good with that.    

We believe in the separation of church and state as strongly as any unincorporated roadside craphole, but it’s time to admit that Google has more demonstrable power and influence than any of your standard-issue gods.  It knows everything.  It provides anything.  When we have a problem, or a question, or a persistent rash in our swimsuit region, we don’t consult a priest or a doctor.  We don’t pray for answers, talk to our parents, or turn to a trusted friend. 

No, the very first thing we do is “Google It”. 

And, more often than not, Google bestows upon us a relevant, useful response, which is more than you can say for Jupiter, who has been really slacking off since the Lectisternium of 217 BC.

Of course, like all major deities, it has a dark side.  The reason we worship it is the same reason we fear it. It can serve us in ways we never imagined possible, but only if we allow it to control us in ways that are scary as hell.

Google is able to do all the things your brain used to do (freeing your brain to pursue its dream of fleeing your skull and joining the circus), because it has the power to force the internet to conform to its rules and procedures.  As the internet’s gatekeeper, Google filters out bad information and bad actors, and efficiently provides whatever your brain desires. In return for its benevolence, all Google demands is complete loyalty and obedience.  It wants to know where you are, what you’re doing, what you’re thinking, and how it can make a buck from this knowledge.  Every moment of every day. 

In The Beginning

We’re sure Bill Gates wishes he had strangled Google in the crib, but he was busy knee-capping Netscape at the time.   Also, it was so cute.  That adorable font.  Those whimsical colours.  Those earnest attempts to provide comprehensive results for your search queries, which were often several thousand pages long.   You couldn’t help but love it, the way you loved a loyal and eager-to-please, if somewhat clumsy, puppy. 

Some people, being people, started to abuse the puppy.  It was easy to figure out how it worked, and therefore easy to drive traffic to your crappy website by stuffing it with common search terms.  Sites with names like “FreeHotSexyPornVideoIkeaAssemblyInstructions.com” sprang up all over the place.  And filled up the first 400 pages on Google. 

Pull that sort of stunt today, and Google will totally Jimmy Hoffa your ass.  Over the years, the abused puppy grew up and, predictably, began patrolling its territory like a junkyard pitbull.  If your website even smells funny, it will be banished from Google’s index, and effectively disappear from the internet. 

Remember, Google doesn’t show you the internet. It shows you its index of internet properties. And since it controls 90 percent of searches, that index might as well be the internet. Where, and if, you appear on the index is solely at Google’s discretion.

When we launched our humble website, we knew we had to gain favour with Google, in order to remain not buried under 12 feet of search engine concrete.  But we had no idea how to achieve a sufficient level of fealty.  What did Google want of us? 

Let’s Get Optimized!

We knew it had something to do with “SEO” – Search Engine Optimization.  Our site had to be “optimized” to comply with Google’s “algorithm” – a set of rules that determine a website’s worthiness to appear on the index.  Preferably, on the first page – the promised land of search engine results.  Beyond this rudimentary knowledge, we were babes in the woods.  We would need some guidance.  

There are plenty of SEO “experts” who will guarantee that they can get your site onto the first page, no matter how much of a repugnant, steaming mound of idiotic drivel your site might be.  These experts claim to have insider information, to have an open channel to Google, possibly via enchanted modems.  We found these claims implausible, since it’s mathematically impossible to cram every website on every subject onto the first page.  Most of these experts were clearly false prophets. 

Who, then, would lead us to the promised land?  Google itself teases you with a few long and winding paths.  You can justify your existence through Google My Business.  You can find out how many, and what kind of, visitors Google is sending your way with Google Analytics.   You can make an offering of sitemaps and robots.txt files and live goats on Google Search Console, in return for verification and even quantification of Google’s general attitude towards you.

These Google-approved paths either go on forever or vanish unexpectedly, leaving you in a barren wilderness, where you will wander aimlessly for years, eventually forgetting why you were there in the first place.

Oh, yeah.  You had a website.  And you wanted people to see it. 

It’s when you reach this level of hopeless desperation that you will turn towards the first Google oracle that offers even a hint of practical worship.  A drowning man isn’t picky about the shape of the driftwood that comes floating by. 

The Yoast With the Most

In our case, we chose Yoast as our medium of communion with Google.  It came well-recommended by other Google soothsayers, and, more importantly, it came free with our website platform.  Yoast admitted, right up front, that they were mostly guessing what Google wanted, and that what Google wanted today was not necessarily what Google would want tomorrow.   This was a refreshing admission.

Still, they had obviously watched Google for a significant period of time, and seemed to have a pretty good idea what it was up to.  Yoast also believed that Google was basically good, even though it now lumbered around unpredictably, doing and creating and destroying things at random.  All they could do, Yoast revealed, was offer a series of rituals that had been successful in appeasing Google in the past, and appealing to the basic goodness which was now entombed somewhere beneath Mount Google.           

Yoast descended from the mountaintop, and delivered Google’s commandments as they understood them.  There were a lot of commandments, since Yoast had a flash drive rather than stone tablets. Fortunately, they will apply the commandments automatically to each page on your website, and reveal where you have gone astray.  Thou shalt use active voice.  Thou shalt not write lengthy paragraphs.  Thou shalt make liberal use of subheadings.  Thou shalt edit thy “snippets” (the results that appear on Google’s search page).   Thou shalt not have consecutive sentences that start with the same word, because Google detests parallelism. Etc.

We followed the commandments to the best of our ability (living up to all the expectations of any omnipotent entity is practically impossible), and still we were deemed practically unreadable.  So we took our quest for enlightenment to the next level, and took Yoast’s free online toadying course – Google Studies 101, if you will – which actually was very enlightening.   

Here, Yoast elaborates on the major anatomical regions of a search engine (the spider, the index, the algorithm, the thorax) and expounds on its core belief that all Google wants is the absolute best for each and every one of us.  It was jamming Google+ down everyone’s throat for our own good, we suppose.   At its essence, however, Google’s intent was simply to rid the internet of pirates and scammers and spammers and useless, crappy content.  At the heart of this effort, the Golden Rule:

Who could argue with that sentiment?  And if it had ended there, we would have gone non-dickishly on our merry way, satisfied that, at the very least, we weren’t doing anything to make the internet worse.   But Yoast had yet another hurdle for the Google faithful, the means to achieve an unassailable state of internet grace.    

The final recommendation is that you engage in “schema markup”, so that you can get “featured snippets”, the ultimate signal that you’ve received a Google blessing from on high.

Jeezus.  Now we had to mark up our schema?  We didn’t even know what, or where, our schema was. 

If we wanted to find out, we’d have to take another course.  And this time, we’d have to pay for it.

When your religious leaders start passing around the collection plate, you begin to question their motives.   Was it possible that Yoast was simply a business, that they were not an entirely altruistic organization dedicated to a righteous and honourable internet?  We didn’t want to believe it, but there we were.  Yoast had walked us right up to the admission gate at the promised land, but we’d have to pay up if we wanted to go through the turnstile.

We Give Up

It seemed like more effort and expense than it was worth.  After all, if “schema markup” was the next big thing in the SEO arms race, then pretty soon someone would automate it, and every snippet would be a “featured snippet”.   Plus, our brains were now filled to the brim with Google-related gibberish and a rising tide of angry voices.  Any attempt to pump any more Google fuel in there was futile and hazardous. 

So we had two options: 

1. Become Google heretics. Unplug the wi-fi, smash our phones, rise up against a power-hungry oppressor, join the growing movement of modern-day Luddites, and put our brains back to work managing the day-to-day operation of our lives.
2. Accept the fact that Google is our all-powerful and unknowable master, and trust that it would allow us, and our stupid website, to exist in its universe, even if our schema remained infernal and unclean. 

Ultimately, we decided our brains weren’t up to the challenge.  After 20 years of relying on Google for everything, we’re not sure there’s any actual information left in there. Plus, that uninterruptible power supply is probably a pretty good idea.   

If you can’t fight ‘em, curl up in a ball and play dead, we say.  Or, if you have a spare, go ahead and sacrifice a goat. 

After months of intense Google study, we figure that makes as much sense as anything else.

Harry Blunder, Acting Mayor