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
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@emilymbender
Good thing they block adblockers then aye?
@emilymbender These companies desperately want to stop us from finding & enjoying each other's content. Walled gardens of social media & mega platforms weren't enough, now the search directories will be the ultimate walled garden.
All built on stealing the work of everyone who's ever published anything online.
Why would anyone create anything anymore? I already feel my own desire to blog is waning.
@emilymbender My bigger worry is if they start ensloppifying scholar.google.com. Zotero Connector eats it right up. Semantic Scholar isn't a patch on it for grabbing bibliographic records and tracking references, I have seen noticeable distortion in its results. Their pipeline is somewhat ML driven but they do use LLM summaries. This is expected given the origins of the service. Provenance is everything.
@emilymbender Six alternatives to Google Search hosted in Europe
https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/google-search
I usually use Qwant and I'm very happy
@emilymbender I want my printed encyclopedia back...
@emilymbender so… search is now Google Wave but with robots.
@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.
@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 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?
@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.
