Wow some terrible reporting about Google's latest horrible ideas about how to distort information access in the name of "convenience" (or something):

[qybat@batchats.net]

@emilymbender Priority is on maximising usage. Sure, they lose money on every user, but they will make it up on scale.

[qybat@batchats.net]

@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.

[shadsterling@mastodon.social]

@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

[odd@mstdn.social]

@emilymbender the 'people acting on information' part is pretty dehumanising as well. As of humans are just a cog in their loop, rather than their product being in ours.

[tommi@pan.rent]

@emilymbender

SEO is going to be so dead.

To me, it’s Search Engines Ostracism now.

[alsvha@sunny.garden]

@emilymbender Google will not be satisfied until they control information and people are stuck on their landing page with their version of information.

It's been a ongoing trend to pull more and more into their page from sources and now even rewrite it.

[lcwander@toot.community]

@hamishb @emilymbender the best opt-out mode is using another search engine. Google search enshittification has been going on for at least 5 years. At this point it is just masochism to use it.

[setok@attractive.space]

@emilymbender yeah, even for someone who is pro-tech and interested in AI developments, this @TechCrunch piece read like a press release. It was journalistically extremely weak to the point I felt dumber for reading it.

[eurospoofer@mastodon.social]

@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?

[gerhardd@olching.social]

@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.

[cockburn@mastodon.moule.world]

@emilymbender google is so unreliable now, it's time for them to lose their worldwide use of "google" as a verb.

[sharksonaplane@mastodon.sandwich.net]

@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.

[turre@mementomori.social]

@emilymbender
Yeah, if somebody is still using Google Search, now is the time to get off it. There are other search engines out there.

[roadskater@mastodon.social]

@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.

[tomtom@pouet.chapril.org]

@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.

[sleepfreeparent@kolektiva.social]

@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

[guillotine_jones@beige.party]

@emilymbender
More rubbish from Google's Pichai.

[tiikerikani@dice.camp]

@emilymbender And here is that press release... https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/search-io-2026/

[allancavanagh@mastodon.social]

@emilymbender so… search is now Google Wave but with robots.

[joeblowenarbol@kolektiva.social]

@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