Wow some terrible reporting about Google's latest horrible ideas about how to distort information access in the name of "convenience" (or something):
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Wow some terrible reporting about Google's latest horrible ideas about how to distort information access in the name of "convenience" (or something):
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-it-is-over/
A short thread
🧵>>@emilymbender 2.5 billion users a month they claim.
Having an AI summary forced into every search doesn't make the searcher a user of the tech. How many people simply ignore the summary? -
Wow some terrible reporting about Google's latest horrible ideas about how to distort information access in the name of "convenience" (or something):
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-it-is-over/
A short thread
🧵>>@emilymbender The good news: nobody needs #google. I've blocked all their MTAs, and resisted using their apps for quite some time. No problems so far.
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@emilymbender google is so unreliable now, it's time for them to lose their worldwide use of "google" as a verb.
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NO NO NO NO NO! Flashy polished looking webpages that no one has accountability for run absolutely counter to the common good when it comes to a health information ecosystem AND an informed public.
(Also, "Antigravity"? Yeah, you want us to think this is very cool science fiction and/or magic. Not buying it.)
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@emilymbender Exactly!
I understand that business value propositions change over time, but going from "we disrupted search by making a simple interface" to "we ruptured search by making our simple interface complicated (and terrible)" is. well, it's certainly. a choice.
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How infantilizing --- you thought you were looking to find something that someone else wrote on the web. But woah! Now you've been "dropped into" an "interactive experience". Yeah, Google can just fuck right off with that.
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@emilymbender
Yeah, if somebody is still using Google Search, now is the time to get off it. There are other search engines out there. -
Wow some terrible reporting about Google's latest horrible ideas about how to distort information access in the name of "convenience" (or something):
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-it-is-over/
A short thread
🧵>>@emilymbender I saw someone toot about that Tuesday afternoon, and my reaction to the article was, "So TechCrunch is rewriting Google press releases?" Not a critical thought expressed in the article. IIRC, no quotes from anyone at all, positive or negative. Just a list of supposedly useful features and enhancements.
Feh.
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@romli @hamishb @emilymbender for the AI overview that precedes any actual search results, that link doesn’t describe a persistent opt-out, only a per-search bypass with “ -ai”. Which is a start
@ShadSterling @romli @hamishb @emilymbender use duckduckgo and you have simple ai opt out .
But anyway all this suppose there will be something left to search for on the web. Nowadays most often than not the first 10 links returned are AI generated web site slop.
Given that this slop is now used to generate further down the drain AI sites, the untrustworthy garbage'll soon supersede 100-1 trustworthy sources.Maybe we'll have to come back to human indexed content of a curated list of sites.
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@emilymbender Why the f**k do they think we need search results that look more like interactive web pages? Isn't that what the web pages that the search results link to are for?
@mrmoore @emilymbender they don't want you to see the pages the search results link to, so they're trying to recreate that experience within search. Once you no longer check the sources, they can claim those sources say whatever Google wants them to have said
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For one final shudder: Pichai here seems to want to think this is helping the world somehow? Gah.
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@emilymbender
More rubbish from Google's Pichai. -
Here is where it really starts to show that this journalist is just lightly paraphrasing a press release. "Links will become an afterthought," will they? What is your evidence for that confident statement about the future?
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@emilymbender And here is that press release... https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/search-io-2026/
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Wow some terrible reporting about Google's latest horrible ideas about how to distort information access in the name of "convenience" (or something):
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-it-is-over/
A short thread
🧵>>@emilymbender so… search is now Google Wave but with robots.
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Wow some terrible reporting about Google's latest horrible ideas about how to distort information access in the name of "convenience" (or something):
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-it-is-over/
A short thread
🧵>>@emilymbender Here's how the NY Times reports this -- https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/business/google-seach-bar-ai-gemini.html?smid=url-share
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@emilymbender The good news: nobody needs #google. I've blocked all their MTAs, and resisted using their apps for quite some time. No problems so far.
@emilymbender@dair-community.social @GerhardD@olching.social eh, gmail is still biiig, i wouldn't outright block it (but it would be fair to send straight to spam lol)
most of the stuff's unneeded tho ye
there's very little that's actually needed, it's just the Default Effect + ecosystem effect
some people do need it tho, much like some people need microslop's stuff
usually when they're already invested, and used to things, it would be possible to migrate away but that would take a whole lot of effort for only moral gain -
@romli @hamishb @emilymbender for the AI overview that precedes any actual search results, that link doesn’t describe a persistent opt-out, only a per-search bypass with “ -ai”. Which is a start
@ShadSterling @romli @hamishb @emilymbender
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/no-shit-sherlock/
Would love to know if this works for you!
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For one final shudder: Pichai here seems to want to think this is helping the world somehow? Gah.
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It sounds better than the truth. This helps Google, the ad-company, to better shape the “experience” as it best suits their paying ad-customers.
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Not satisfied to cut people off from the important sense-making of looking at information in its context and finding and navigating different perspectives (what "AI overviews" do), Google also wants to tell you what to search for:
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@emilymbender
"rather than making you decide" is such a fancy way of saying "we've removed your choice". -
@emilymbender Links become an afterthought. Websites see their traffic plummet because the LLM is summarising everything on the search page. No one sees the ads, sites go out of business, LLM has no new data to train on and starts to lag behind current events.
@Qybat @emilymbender if no one sees the ads, the companies will stop buying adspace. That's not what google wants. So I guess they will embed the ads in the search results.
And the web will have finally evolved to be just like television. Just a bit more interactive because you'll be allowed to purchase directly what you see on screen (but probably nothing else).
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More stenography here. Google starting shoving the "AI Overviews" into query results as an opt-out situation. That is, you have to take action to have them not pop up. I don't doubt they are *shown to* 2.5 billion monthly users, but that doesn't mean they are used by as many or desired by them.
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@emilymbender this is enshittification of the next level to turn us into brainless puppets on their strings
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Wow some terrible reporting about Google's latest horrible ideas about how to distort information access in the name of "convenience" (or something):
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-it-is-over/
A short thread
🧵>>@emilymbender Is this an article of press release? Either way it's AWFUL.
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How infantilizing --- you thought you were looking to find something that someone else wrote on the web. But woah! Now you've been "dropped into" an "interactive experience". Yeah, Google can just fuck right off with that.
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