Look, the 90's Internet isn't cool anymore. Sorry. Things are cool for a while and then they're not.

Franchises die. It's still cool to say "The originals were really cool", and always will be, but now we're talking about now. Star Wars is uncool. There are people who sort of automatically praise it and subtly put down those who don't like they're aligned with a magnetic field, sure, but they're in their own world. Indiana Jones and Ghostbusters are uncool now. Star Trek is almost there. AI is not cool and never will be. Tiktok is cool, but soon everything that is uncool will descend upon it.

Sorry. Bananas blacken and apples get spots. Time moves on.

Downvoting isn't cool. Reply instead.

You're joking, but they're really trying hard to make cool things uncool.

I don't know why people are so aggressively downvoting this. It's the honest truth.

I grew up before Google, I remember when it was just a useful search tool. Then an industry grew up around exploiting it in various ways and ads became a major revenue source for Google, completely changing the platform. I witnessed this entire online marketing/ad industry come into existence.

I have friends who worked in SEO for years. Very talented, smart people. But that industry is gone now. Likewise Google ads is clearly not long for this world as Google will probably get a lot more money leveraging their AI for product recommendations/sales etc.

People used creative thinking to create this industry, so the answer to "where do we go now?" is find the next one. It won't just be the same thing repeated, just like SEO and ad optimization where fairly major departures from the previous world of advertising and marketing they came from.

Did you read the page? The context is very clear: a small business that had for years gotten a lot of its leads/customers from Adwords is seeing that Adwords ("Google" in context) is not working. They are then asking (other small businesses in the same situation, "where do we go now?").

There nothing about nostalgia, no real concern for Google as a company, or how the web used to work, etc. Just a small business trying to stay afloat.

"Cool" is precisely the problem. Cool is completely irrelevant to whether something is useful or valuable.

It seems you didn't read the article, which doesn't tell anything about google being cool or uncool.