Did Big Tech and Mainstream Media Break Search Engines—or Did They Sabotage Themselves?
Did Big Tech and Mainstream Media Break Search Engines—or Did They Sabotage Themselves?
Introduction: A Personal Journey Through a Digital Revolution
In the mid-1990s, I was a struggling artist in Rapid City, South Dakota, juggling a new marriage, a hefty mortgage, and a burning desire to turn my creative passion into a sustainable livelihood. Freshly laid off from a corporate job, I faced setback after setback—my carpentry shop burned down, and my entrepreneurial dreams kept hitting brick walls. Yet, my artwork—whether glass etching, graphic design, or drafting—remained my lifeline. I carried a bulky, ragged portfolio from business to business, hoping to impress clients. But it was disorganized, hard to present, and a constant source of frustration.
That’s when I began dreaming of a better way—a digital solution to showcase my work. Little did I know this pursuit would lead me to witness the rise and potential fall of search engines, the decline of traditional media, and the troubling trajectory of information control in the digital age. This is my story as an artist, entrepreneur, and accidental insider to the tech and media industries—a story of innovation, frustration, and a warning about the chaotic future of truth and trust online.
The Dawn of the Digital Portfolio: A Spark of Innovation
Back in 1995, the internet was a wild frontier. Search engines were virtually nonexistent, and the closest thing to a digital directory was a 4-inch-thick book of URLs sold at Borders. I imagined putting my portfolio on a floppy disk—a digital business card I could hand to clients. But walking into an office and asking someone to load a stranger’s disk into their computer felt intrusive and impractical. So, I approached a media company to build a website for my artwork. Their quote? A staggering $8,000—equivalent to a four-year college degree at the time. For a struggling artist, it was a non-starter.
Frustrated but undeterred, I dove into self-education. I spent my last $100 on books about HTML, JPEGs, Dreamweaver, and Macromedia Flash at Borders. To my surprise, I picked up web development quickly. By 1997, I was building websites, experimenting with graphic design and video editing, and even setting up my own domains. I was no longer just an artist—I was becoming a “geek” in a rapidly evolving digital world. By 2000, living in remote Deadwood, South Dakota, with only dial-up internet via my cellphone, I’d gone all-in on digital. My paintbrushes gathered dust as I embraced a new passion: creating and managing online content.
The Rise of Search Engines: Google Changes Everything
In 1999, I heard the word “Google” for the first time on the Black Hills State University campus in Spearfish, South Dakota. Students were buzzing about this new search engine that could actually find things online. When I tested it, I was stunned—people could discover my websites. But getting noticed wasn’t easy. I had to learn how to “infiltrate” Google’s algorithms, a term I used before it became known as SEO (Search Engine Optimization). I studied how to make my sites fresh and relevant, like leaving a sugar cake on a lawn for ants to carry back to the “mothership” (Google). The key? Constantly updating content to keep the “ants” coming back.
By the early 2000s, search engines were exploding. Google emerged as the leader, outpacing competitors like Dogpile, Yahoo, and AOL’s walled garden. I focused on building an “electronic handshake” between my websites and Google, ensuring my content ranked high in natural organic results. But as I honed my skills, I noticed a shift: newspapers and mainstream media were dominating search results. Their fresh, daily content—often syndicated through the Associated Press (AP)—was climbing to the top, while smaller sites like mine struggled to keep up.
The News Industry’s Fatal Misstep
In 2005, I saw the news industry heading for a cliff. While companies like Lee Enterprises invested billions in full-color printing presses, readers were abandoning print subscriptions for Google News and other online sources. The industry was clinging to an outdated model, unable to monetize online content effectively. Full-page ads that once cost $25,000 in print were worthless online.
The News Industry’s Fatal Misstep
In 2005, the news industry was sleepwalking into its own demise. Companies like Lee Enterprises were doubling down on print, investing billions in full-color printing presses while readers flocked to Google News for free, fresh content. The industry’s lifeblood—print subscriptions and high-priced ads—was drying up. A full-page ad that once fetched $25,000 in a newspaper was now nearly worthless online, where users despised intrusive ads and craved clean, accessible information. Newspapers, desperate to survive, tried to replicate their print model online with subscriptions, but they misunderstood the internet’s ethos: people wanted content, not paywalls.
Meanwhile, Google was forging cozy partnerships with mainstream media, particularly the Associated Press (AP). By 2006, Google struck a licensing deal to feature AP content in Google News, a move that cemented the dominance of major news outlets in search results. Smaller websites, like the ones I was building, struggled to compete. The algorithms favored “fresh” content, and newspapers—despite their cluelessness about digital—had the resources to churn out daily stories.
The game wasn’t over, I was indexing over 10,000 pages successfully in the search engines back then and was a major site in Google organics through everything I learned and was learning. I was ranked in the top 2% of online news sites back then.
Click the picture to go back and see.👇
In 2006 I was holding my own with great search index, ratings were through the roof.
But there was a catch: much of this content was syndicated, not mine theirs. Thousands of newspapers published nearly identical AP stories, flooding Google News with redundant information. Google had to figure out how to filter this deluge, often prioritizing one or two outlets while burying the rest. This wasn’t just a technical issue—it was the beginning of a deeper problem.
The Rise of “Fake News” and the Loss of Trust
By the mid-2000s, I noticed something troubling. Mainstream media outlets, now dominating search results, were often pushing narratives that felt disconnected from reality. Print was dead, they just wouldn’t except the fact. It was like watching a patient with cardio vascular disease. Whether you call it “fake news” (as it’s known today) or biased reporting, the public was starting to notice. People like me—small-time entrepreneurs, bloggers, and independent creators—wanted to share authentic stories, but we were drowned out by the media giants. Google’s algorithms, intentionally or not, were amplifying these outlets, giving them top billing in natural organic results. The common person’s blog or small business site? Buried deep in the search results, often hundreds of pages down.
I was teaching businesses about SEO by then, showing them how to write fresh content, use keywords, tags, and keep their sites dynamic to climb Google’s rankings. But the game was rigged. The news industry, backed by Google’s algorithms, held a monopoly on visibility. This wasn’t just a technical issue—it was a cultural one. The mainstream media, still grappling with the shift from print to digital, didn’t understand the internet’s potential or its audience. They were slicing their own throats by alienating readers with paywalls and recycled content, while Google, their new best friend, enabled their dominance without questioning their credibility.
The Great Purge and the Paywall Problem
Fast forward to 2020, and the cracks in the system became a chasm. The “Great Purge,” as I call it, saw Big Tech—Google, social media platforms, and others—deplatforming conservative voices and independent sites. Whether you agree with those voices or not, the pattern was clear: Big Tech and mainstream media were working in tandem to control the narrative. Sites that didn’t align with the dominant ideology were pushed off the internet or buried so deep in search results they might as well not exist. SEO, once a tool for the little guy to compete, became a labyrinth of ever-changing rules, making it nearly impossible for small sites to rank.
At the same time, paywalls proliferated. By the early 2020s, nearly every major news outlet locked their content behind subscriptions. This hit home during a Florida hurricane, when my family and I were sheltering and desperately searching for weather updates. Every top result in Google—mainstream news sites—demanded a subscription to read critical information about a storm bearing down on our home. Digging through pages of results to find free, reliable updates was maddening. The internet, once a beacon
of open information, was becoming a walled garden, gatekept by subscriptions and algorithms that favored corporate media over independent voices. This wasn’t just inconvenient—it was a betrayal of the internet’s original promise: a free, democratic exchange of ideas.
The Arrival of AI: A New Layer of Control
Enter artificial intelligence. By the mid-2020s, AI tools like Grok, created by xAI—were reshaping how people accessed information. Unlike traditional search engines, which return links to pages, AI systems scrape data from those pages and deliver summarized answers. This sounds convenient, but it introduces a new problem which is almost identical as the first problem with search and MSM: the data AI pulls is often sourced from the same biased, paywalled, or algorithmically favored mainstream media sites that dominate search results. Instead of seeing the raw content and judging for yourself, you get a processed version, filtered through AI’s interpretation of what’s “relevant.” And just like search engines, AI is increasingly locked behind subscriptions, again creating yet another barrier to accessing unfiltered information that you can trust.
I saw this coming years ago. My early experiments with content management systems like ColdFusion in the 2000s were about making information accessible and manageable, not controlling it.
I built a community portal that hosted thousands of news stories and business listings, a precursor to today’s social media and content platforms. But unlike today’s tech giants, my goal was to empower local businesses and voices, not gatekeep their content or push a narrative. AI, while powerful, risks becoming another tool for Big Tech to consolidate control, delivering curated answers that align with the same mainstream media narratives I watched dominate Google two decades ago.
A Whistleblower’s Warning: Controlled Chaos and the Death of Truth
As I reflect on my journey—from a struggling artist with a ragged portfolio to a self-taught web developer navigating the rise of search engines—I see a troubling pattern. Big Tech and mainstream media didn’t just break search engines; they broke trust. The internet, once a community bulletin board where ideas could flourish, has become a battleground for control. Google’s algorithms, cozy with the AP and major outlets, prioritized corporate voices over independent ones. The Great Purge of 2020 silenced dissenting perspectives. Paywalls turned critical information into a luxury. And now, AI threatens to package it all into a neat, subscription-based box, spoon-feeding users curated answers instead of raw truth.
I’m not just an observer—I’m an insider who lived this transformation. I built websites when the internet was young, learned to game Google’s algorithms before SEO was a buzzword, and watched the news industry self-destruct while Big Tech enabled it. I’ve seen the signs of this “controlled chaos” since the early 2000s, when Google started favoring mainstream media and small voices like mine got buried. Today, I worry that my own sites—where I’ve shared stories about toxic problems in my life and community—could be targeted, de-indexed, or shut down for challenging the status quo. Let me be clear: I’m not suicidal. If anything happens to me or my work, it’s not by my hand.
The Future: Reclaiming the Community Bulletin Board
The internet was supposed to be a digital town square, a place where ideas, news, and community updates could flow freely. But Big Tech and mainstream media turned it into a pay-to-play system, where truth is filtered, access is restricted, and trust is eroding. The catastrophic future I see isn’t just about broken search engines—it’s about a world where information is so controlled that we lose the ability to discern truth for ourselves. It’s like a young athlete collapsing on a field, with doctors claiming ignorance while the signs were there all along. I saw those signs in the 1990s and 2000s, and they’re screaming at us now.
We need to reclaim the internet’s original spirit: a community bulletin board of shared ideas, free from corporate gatekeepers and algorithmic bias. That means supporting independent creators, demanding transparency from tech giants, and using tools like AI to amplify truth, not suppress it. My story—as an artist, entrepreneur, and accidental whistleblower—is a call to action. We can’t let Big Tech and mainstream media dictate what we see, read, or believe. The stakes are too high. We must fight back in this Age of Chaos! Share this story.