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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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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@yala fits perfectly @emilymbender
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But all the academic papers in the world showing why something is a bad idea won't stop companies from doing it, if it's profitable and/or fits into their quasi-religious beliefs that "AI" is the future, alas.
So let's look at what Google is up to now, or at least says they are, via TechCrunch as stenographer:
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@emilymbender I'll see you that and raise you cogent arguments about why behavioural change, not just education, are needed: https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/news/largest-quantitative-synthesis-date-reveals-what-predicts-human-behavior-and-how-change-it Secondary reference from the APNIC blog about why IPv6 uptake has failed to reach certain expectations; which, ironically, is a part of the Internet relatively free from unwanted LLM scraper incursion, so far. The neat Hilbert curve based heat maps for IPv4 address spaces do not map so neatly to IPv6 because of the massively increased address space.
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5 years ago (2021) Google researchers Metzler et al put out a preprint talking about how LLMs would change information access ("Rethinking Search"). It was full of TERRIBLE ideas, and Chirag Shah and I wrote a reply ("Situating Search"):
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3498366.3505816
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@emilymbender The point that their search product was already, to use the vernacular, crap, at this point, must have been lost on them, and Sundar Pichai in particular is responsible for this, as Ed Zitron has neatly elaborated upon elsewhere.
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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 Infantalism is GAFAM's Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). The comparisons with Aldous Huxley's seminal work betray themselves.
