My son turned 16 last week, so you can assume I’ve been talking about him for a while. But even after all these years, when I say “Graeme” into my phone, it displays “Grandma.” People say “make sure his name is in your contacts.” As if it’s not.

Still, that’s not as frustrating as entering a term with a clear minus sign into Google and having it override that to show me promoted sites with exactly the thing I asked them not to show. They say they support boolean search operators, until that cuts down on the ads they can show you.

It makes me wonder—are we watching the decline as we speak? Or, as Siri might put it, “asp wheeze Peak”.

The trouble, as we all know, is money. 80% of Google’s parent company’s revenue comes from search advertising. They aren’t a public service. We can’t expect them to act like one.

While the Siri fails and speech-to-text rewrites are funny at best and annoying at worst (unless you’re dictating to a client, trying to integrate voice commands into your apps, or you’re one of the millions of diverse professionals these problems leave behind), the demise of Google can be the bigger issue for marketers.

The trouble, as we all know, is money. 80% of Google’s parent company’s revenue comes from search advertising. They aren’t a public service. We can’t expect them to act like one.

Now that we’ve made Google a verb, meaning we need them more than they need us, it’s returning the favor by making it harder for people to find what they need—and for you to get found. They’re making it very nearly necessary to buy your search terms. But it’s not over yet.

If you want to rank on organic search, you may need to change your objectives. Try to resist the urge to try to beat Google at the game they play so well. Or to beat companies that have armies of SEO and SEM folk trying to manipulate their way to the top. Make your content for people, in human language and keep adding to it. You’re more likely to get those folks who are using less common but more valuable long-tail keywords. After all, users are realizing that if they want quality, they need to be specific.

Make sure your metrics reflect that. If you’re a small or midsize or even fairly large company, hoping to rank in the top 3 for broad search terms is just going to cost you a lot of money and energy.

Go back to basics and solve a person’s problem. Figure out exactly who you’re talking to. Understand what they need. And then tell them how you’re going to solve it.

Oh, and the answer on Siri, Alexa and all the other speech-to-text and autocorrect problems out there? It’s still about money—as in, they don’t generate it. They aren’t a priority. Companies like Nuance, who sell speech-to-text to law firms and the like, get it right. (Interestingly, Nuance powered Siri 10+ years ago—perhaps that’s why we remember her fondly. Now the company is owned by Microsoft, so I suspect they’re no longer collaborating on iProducts.)

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