How Google Made the World Go Viral - The Verge

To use the language of today, Lenssen and his cohort of bloggers were the earliest content creators. Their tastes and sensibilities would inflect much of digital media today, from Wordle to food Instagram. It might seem unfathomable now, but unlike the creators of 2023, the bloggers of the early 2000s weren’t in a low-grade war with algorithms. By optimizing for PageRank, they were helping Google by making it better. And that was good for everyone because making Google better was good for the internet

Those hundreds of millions of websites jockeying for placement on the first page of results don’t influence how culture works, as Sullivan sees it. For him, Google Search activity does not create more search activity. Decades may have passed, but people are essentially still searching for “Jennifer Lopez dress.” Culture motivates what goes into the search box, and it’s a one-way street.