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 i'm fucking weepi ng
Information-gathering agents are an evolution of Google
i have never observed google demonstrate any behavior that struck me as evidence of them gathering any form of information
Links will become an afterthought
that reminds me how they own the w3c and use it to ensure no one who has ever created a webpage will ever be able to show it to anyone without exposing them to the most openly broken cryptography i've ever seem
There’s little time left for publishers to adapt.
openly gloating
which will eventually be free
that's right. we will all be free. that's a cryptographic guarantee
@hipsterelectron @emilymbender Seems more like we are free to give everything to Google for free and not get any traffic in return. 🤔
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.
We followed a couple of years later with further arguments about, inter alia, protecting the information ecosystem:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649468
While Nora Lindemann was writing about similar ideas:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-024-01944-w
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@emilymbender i want you to know your repeated scientific deconstruction of google's ideological warfare under the guise of a search interface has enabled me to extrapolate at great length how the entire formalisms of automata theory have been constructed to exclude any investigation that could ever produce a paper with more than 1% performance improvement over their state of the art. parsing and formal languages has been dead for several decades.
google calls it a "parser confusion vulnerability" when python maintainers use features of the zip file format in their own published releases that make it impossible for specifically google to insert a cryptograpic backdoor onto their users' machines (because google owns pypi), while at the same time the python METADATA file format actively right now supports an "ambiguity' intentionally invisible to human reviewers but instructs the standard packaging software to download and execute code that won't show up in the output.
just as you said:
We revisit foundational work related to information behavior, information seeking, information retrieval, information filtering, and information access to resurface what we know about these fundamental questions and what may be missing.
i very recently realized these questions can be quantified in the field of operating system design, in a really drastic sense that led me to switch my research focus because i'm confident i can convince people every computer should work this way.
just this weekend i realized (quite by mistake) that a fact i'd known since 2019, when google made mozila and twitter lay off their teams of scientists who had just publicly demonstrated that google chrome and bazel products were neither "fast" nor "correct", in ways that are easily and obviously quantifiable, also represented a shocking and obvious failure in the entire theory of operating system design. not just that computers are slow and fail to protect the user, but how demonstrate a thrilling counterexample
which is to say, after an intensive literature review (including "standards" for "portable" behavior that were neither), i'm confident i've identified a novel property for computer security which results from a computer performance property that i could already prove 12 ways from sunday. and i now know how to construct a system that achieves both.
i found a dissertation from the single person who tried something pretty close https://circumstances.run/@hipsterelectron/116602585443289491 but otherwise i have performed sufficient literature review to be confident i can express this result in a way that will convince any convince anyone familiar with the field that there's a whole other field they'd been missing this whole time.
and it will run on a computer or phone, to protect people from harm. it demonstrates how the temporal and spatial structure of computer memory in response to user input can be described as a correctness property of the operating system. like i did to google's bazel, it will defeat them in their own terms
thank you
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 Sometimes it feels like these people are trying to create a world from science fiction stories. For example, in Star Trek when they ask the computer something and it just gives them the answer. They don't understand that plenty of science fiction has no basis in reality and/or are terrible for how our brains actually work (like you've pointed out).
That or they are just greedy bastards that are looking to exploit anyone and everyone for a profit.
@emilymbender I'll see you that and raise you: 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, 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.
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 you know, I was just thinking
Google gave up on "don't be evil" at least a decade ago
while I worked there about five years ago, they gave up on "respect the user, respect the opportunity, respect each other"
now they seem to have given up on "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"
I hate that my livelihood is still tied to them.
@emilymbender you know, I was just thinking
Google gave up on "don't be evil" at least a decade ago
while I worked there about five years ago, they gave up on "respect the user, respect the opportunity, respect each other"
now they seem to have given up on "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"
I hate that my livelihood is still tied to them.
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 Oh, goodie. They've invented a guy who barges between you and the library shelves and proceeds to give you his vague recollection of what some of the books say. Sort of. Maybe. Unless he decides you were actually looking for something else.
@emilymbender
Yeah, if somebody is still using Google Search, now is the time to get off it. There are other search engines out there.
Look, I hate pointy-clicky interfaces as much as the next Gen-Xer (let me use the keyboard, dammit) but it is so weird to reduce the important, and importantly effortful, work of navigating the information ecosystem to the apparent drudgery of clicking on links that are (*shudder*) blue!!!
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2 media
@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.
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 I think jwz has opinions on links becoming "an afterthought"
@emilymbender Silly, you're acting like there's any need for links. To do what? Check the veracity of the AI-generated wisdom and information being provided to you by the high priests of Google?? Heresy! Blasphemy!! How durst thee???
@emilymbender And here is that press release... https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/search-io-2026/
@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.
Spot the magical thinking here. No, the "AI" isn't making sense of anything. It's making papier-mache of the input, and preventing the use from doing the sense-making.
Also, is that the Pokemon sense of "evolution"?
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To expand just a little bit: the point of a Google Alert was to gain access to things that people were saying about a topic that you were tracking, which you otherwise might not turn up. And every (blue, even!) link that you clicked on brought you to a web page you could examine to get a sense of who was writing, in what context, and why.
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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 wait! You can opt out?!
@emilymbender, that was exactly the point at which I started configuring browsers to add “&udm=14” to all searches done via G💩💩gle.
Most recent case? I noticed that Calibre does word lookup. It will happily do so via Google; and, yes, the slop summary is shown.
@emilymbender this is enshittification of the next Level to Turn us into brainless puppets in their strings
@emilymbender Priority is on maximising usage. Sure, they lose money on every user, but they will make it up on scale.
There is a huge difference between Google *showing* LLM results to users and user actively seeking to engage with ChatGPT. Google have unwittingly shown that their LLM is not as popular as the claim.
The comparsion to ChatGPT in the above screencap also really shows the PR origins of this piece. Google is clearly very very concerned about losing their advantage in this market to OpenAI.
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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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Thank you for this thread and breakdown!
Antigravity is a fantastic name, though. A concept directly contrary to observable reality which can never provide what it purports to do, but which demands infinite money to research and build a la a Perpetual Motion machine? Perfect, and I look forward to them naming their future confidence tricks in a similar manner.
Google Phlogiston. Google Luminous Aether. Google Phrenology.
@emilymbender so we won't know what's AI slop and what's a real site?
@emilymbender It is "antigravity" in the marketing/community-management sense of "gravity." It'll definitely push everyone away...
@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.
@emilymbender it *is* completely ungrounded 🙄
@arestelle I see what you did there!
@emilymbender Why the f**k do 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? 
For one final shudder: Pichai here seems to want to think this is helping the world somehow? Gah.
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@emilymbender, he's mostly right. It definitely is helping the world… burn.
@emilymbender Infantalism is GAFAM's Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). The comparisons with Aldous Huxley's seminal work betray themselves.
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.
@emilymbender
More rubbish from Google's Pichai.
We don't have to buy this journalist's view of the future as already written by Google. Every time you click through to look at the actual source page you are helping to maintain our information ecosystem and build a better world.
/fin (for now)
@emilymbender So long, Googles.
@emilymbender
I guess you are already aware of the "CEO said a thing" concept.
@emilymbender Thank you for this summary and analysis!
