They used to ensure a mix of results: some blogs, some forum posts, some reviews, some videos. Now it’s just the bigger players.
If I search for a big Canadian bank, the first page is entirely their own website and their own social media properties. Even Wikipedia is toward the bottom of the page…
It’s more of a search engine for adverts now than it is a search engine for content, like corporate classifieds.
I imagine what the landscape would be like if they had any kind of formidable competition in the earlier years.
My expectation is that most people searching for the name of the bank are doing it because they are trying to find the official bank pages.
If searches like [bankname fraud] etc also mostly got the bank's own pages, that would be a problem, but this sounds like giving people what they're looking for?
[big canadian bank with 4-letters criticism] is better, though
It makes serendipitous web search and surfing nearly impossible and like you said, the first pages of results are stuffed with corporate sites and things that changed in the last week.
Bing, btw, will only ever return <900 results.
There might also be an ad for a competitor in the top position.