Speaker 1: All Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host ed Zichron.
Speaker 2: What Hey, You ever wonder who ruined Google? Well, the
Speaker 2: answer is Prabagar Ragavan, Google's former head of ads, who
Speaker 2: led a coup to run Google Search, which led to
Speaker 2: websites to k Now, I'm not just recounting my own
Speaker 2: work here. My source is Google Search. No, really really,
Speaker 2: search who ruined Google on Google Search and it will
Speaker 2: pop up with an AI generated summary of multiple articles
Speaker 2: that cite a piece I wrote called the Man who
Speaker 2: Killed Google Search? Why Because on May fourteenth, twenty twenty four,
Speaker 2: Google decided, in their incredible wisdom to add generative artificial
Speaker 2: intelligence to search results. These new AI generated results, dubbed
Speaker 2: Google's Search Generative ex Experience, replace the initial links you'll
Speaker 2: see on some pages with an aioverview, one generated by
Speaker 2: scraping the text of other websites, so that Google can
Speaker 2: answer your questions without you having to visit them and
Speaker 2: consequently give them any ad revenue. It's very strange, but
Speaker 2: also you may be thinking, isn't generate if AI the
Speaker 2: thing that regularly gets things wrong and is kind of unreliable,
Speaker 2: and everyone knows about that Google wouldn't do that right wrong.
Speaker 2: McKinsey alumnus and Google CEO Sundar Pshai told The Verges
Speaker 2: Nile Patel that he believes these results will actually help
Speaker 2: the Web. I'd argue otherwise, these generative results will only
Speaker 2: help centralize the Web's information around these big publishers that
Speaker 2: Google likes, all while creating less of a need for
Speaker 2: anybody to visit the rest of the Internet as in
Speaker 2: any of the other links, even if they're presented along
Speaker 2: an AI generated summary. As Lauren Good of Wyatt said
Speaker 2: in a recent piece about Google's new shift to AI,
Speaker 2: by choosing when and where these overviews appear, Google is
Speaker 2: essentially deciding what is or is not a complex question,
Speaker 2: and then they're making a judgment on what kind of
Speaker 2: web content should inform its summaries, as well as what
Speaker 2: content you're actually going to see or learn from. Yet,
Speaker 2: these articles are also predicated on one very, very very
Speaker 2: silly assumption. And I really respect Lauren and Nile, but seriously,
Speaker 2: you're making one major mistake. You're assuming that Google actually
Speaker 2: cares about building and maintaining a good search engine. Though
Speaker 2: it's been fixed since I wrote this script, you used
Speaker 2: to as in a few days ago, be able to
Speaker 2: ask Google if there was a country in Africa that
Speaker 2: began with the letter K, and it would have resulted
Speaker 2: in the generative result that says as of September twenty
Speaker 2: twenty one, no African country begins with the letter K. However,
Speaker 2: Kenya is the closest African country to starting with a
Speaker 2: K sound with two citations a forum post from twenty
Speaker 2: twenty one that quoted a hallucination from chat GPT and
Speaker 2: a website titled countries that start with the letter K
Speaker 2: with the very sentence beginning with Kenya. Google's generative search
Speaker 2: results have also recently said that one could use Elmer's
Speaker 2: glue to keep cheese from sliding off of a pizza,
Speaker 2: or that a dog played in the NBA, or that
Speaker 2: something called a squad plug is a device that helps
Speaker 2: keep the glutes tight while squatting, rather than a joke
Speaker 2: scraped from a Reddit post about a very very specific
Speaker 2: kind of sex toy. Do not look it up. You
Speaker 2: do not need to know. These results, by the way,
Speaker 2: have already been taken care of because of the massive
Speaker 2: shit storm that Google is dealing with from the very
Speaker 2: obvious mistake they've made and will continue to make. It's
Speaker 2: very upsetting. And these results are a result of a
Speaker 2: modified version of Google's Gemini Generative AI. They're equivalent of
Speaker 2: chat GBT, generating answers based on the content of web pages.
Speaker 2: And these web pages can include everything. I'm talking news outlets,
Speaker 2: random blogs, posts from Reddit, and it's just this vile
Speaker 2: new strategy where and I'm quoting the new head of Search,
Speaker 2: Liz Read, You're allowing Google to do the googling for you. Now,
Speaker 2: this is of course a really horrible idea for many
Speaker 2: many reasons. As I've mentioned repeatedly in the past, GENERAFAI
Speaker 2: has this tendency to hallucinate, where it authoritatively states something
Speaker 2: that just is not true, mostly because these models don't
Speaker 2: actually know anything. General IVAI, like Gemini or chat GBT
Speaker 2: or Anthropics Claude or metas Lama. They're all responding to
Speaker 2: your queries by predicting what the most likely to be
Speaker 2: correct answer is based on parameters that they learned in
Speaker 2: their training data, which means that Google's AI powered search
Speaker 2: is googling for you with absolutely no comprehension or intellectual
Speaker 2: understanding or really any read of the content itself. As
Speaker 2: a result, all it's able to do is say, okay, ah,
Speaker 2: all right. These phrases seem to make up what the
Speaker 2: right answer could be based on mathematics, and these links
Speaker 2: seem to include these phrases, So I guess that's fine,
Speaker 2: which is why Google all briefly recommended that you eat
Speaker 2: one rock a day because it was generating an answer
Speaker 2: from the satirical newspaper The Onion. Google's response was to
Speaker 2: tell the vergis Kylie Robison that these were generally very
Speaker 2: uncommon queries that are not representative of most people's experience,
Speaker 2: specifically responding to Robison's own query where Google told her
Speaker 2: that the mammal with the most bones was a python
Speaker 2: just to be clear of python is a reptile. They
Speaker 2: do have bones though, fu fact. Now, as funny as
Speaker 2: these results might be, Google's AI powered search is really
Speaker 2: horrible for the Internet at large. By summarizing other people's
Speaker 2: links to generate an answer, Google's effectively stolen the Internet,
Speaker 2: picking and choosing what parts it deems worthy of showing you,
Speaker 2: and then providing this kind of hackneyed, hallucination prone summary
Speaker 2: of what they think the links mean. Google's already positioned
Speaker 2: itself as a gatekeeper of the Internet. By the way,
Speaker 2: they're meant to be the steward of what's important. And
Speaker 2: important is the word that they used in the regional
Speaker 2: paper to describe page rank, which was how they rank pages.
Speaker 2: And the theoretical value exchange was that we get reliable,
Speaker 2: safe results that actually answered our queries. But AI powered searches,
Speaker 2: they kind of turned Google into a source of truth
Speaker 2: and not a remotely reliable one. And they're using a
Speaker 2: technology that is well known for getting things wrong. Now
Speaker 2: you may think, well, surely Google would be both aware
Speaker 2: of this and even if they even if they were
Speaker 2: aware of it, they would they wouldn't put this hallucination
Speaker 2: prone tech in deliberately. Right, Surely this must be some
Speaker 2: kind of mistake. And you are wrong, because san Dar
Speaker 2: Pashai told Nile Patel in an interview that happened earlier
Speaker 2: last week that they're well aware of the problem of
Speaker 2: hallucinations and that they were still unsolved and that they
Speaker 2: were an inherent feature of large language models. Sundar, You're
Speaker 2: completely correct, at which point the CEO of Google said
Speaker 2: that large language models were good because of this, and
Speaker 2: that in fact, it made them very creative, Sunda, what
Speaker 2: the hell are you talking about, man, I don't need
Speaker 2: Google to be creative. I need Google to answer my
Speaker 2: bloody question. When you say someone's being creative with the truth,
Speaker 2: you're describing someone lying. Oh my god, I feel like anyway. Anyway,
Speaker 2: it's extremely obvious how dangerous this strategy is. Generative. AI
Speaker 2: could hallucinate I don't know how to deal with a
Speaker 2: chemical fire or a mental health issue, or authoritatively misinform
Speaker 2: somebody that say, I don't know Barack Obama was a Muslim,
Speaker 2: which is an actual generitive result that Google has since
Speaker 2: removed billions of people, regular non technical people, people that
Speaker 2: don't live on social media in the swill and constantly
Speaker 2: see the new news. They rely on Google every day
Speaker 2: to answer questions. And they're going to assume that a
Speaker 2: multi trillion dollar tech company would not turn the most
Speaker 2: well trafficked source of information in the bloody world over
Speaker 2: to an aid. And Peter kafk go Over, a business insider,
Speaker 2: actually put this really well. He said, it's like the
Speaker 2: difference between being handed a map and being given directions
Speaker 2: that will send your car barreling over a cliff. I
Speaker 2: won't mince words, Google's AI powered searches a goddamn travesty,
Speaker 2: both for the Internet and for society at large. By
Speaker 2: choosing what queries to summarize and what sites to pull from,
Speaker 2: Google both centralizes and polarizes the world's information, all while
Speaker 2: depriving actual publishers of traffic, the actual human beings creating
Speaker 2: the things that inform their search engine. And it's horrible.
Speaker 2: That alone is such a horrible problem. Now. Of course,
Speaker 2: Sandar Pashai told nil A Patel, who just went, yeah,
Speaker 2: sure mate, okay, no pushback, man. He told them, no,
Speaker 2: this is actually good for the web because people will
Speaker 2: get the answers and then they'll click through. Yeah. Let
Speaker 2: me give you an example of how wrong you are, Sandar.
Speaker 2: Look at social media. Look at when people see clickbait.
Speaker 2: Do you think people go, oh, I should check the link.
Speaker 2: This could be used to get engagement for my tweet. No,
Speaker 2: they tweet the thing and get mad about it. I've
Speaker 2: done this within the last twenty four hours. I'm an idiot.
Speaker 2: But still people are not going to be curious. They're
Speaker 2: going to assume that Google Search is not full of nonsense,
Speaker 2: that Google Search is not spitting out AI generated summaries
Speaker 2: using hallucination pron AI I feel like and going crazy anyway,
Speaker 2: while AI results cite their sources. It's just it's foolish
Speaker 2: to believe that regular people are going to click through
Speaker 2: to the results when Google itself has already answered the question,
Speaker 2: especially on service driven queries that answer, say, whether a
Speaker 2: food is safe or some sort of factual question. Publishers,
Speaker 2: especially news outlets, already heavily dependent on Google Search traffic.
Speaker 2: They're terrified that these summaries will further reduce traffic at
Speaker 2: a time when social networks like Facebook, for example, are
Speaker 2: no longer really sending them readers. And let's be honest,
Speaker 2: Google search has already deteriorated drastically over the last few years,
Speaker 2: and its results are plagued with AI generated spam and
Speaker 2: search engine optimized nonsense. And these results overwhelm good, unique,
Speaker 2: authoritative content to the point that major newspapers are put
Speaker 2: out public service announcements like the Wall Street Journal, by
Speaker 2: the way, about how to avoid scams in the very
Speaker 2: first results you see on Google. Now, you'd think that
Speaker 2: this deluge of bad press would make Google say, humh,
Speaker 2: we should fix Google Search, we should make things better. No, No, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: that's not what we do here at Google. No. Google
Speaker 2: plugged in an already unreliable artificial intelligence into a product
Speaker 2: that it's deliberately allowed to decay so that customers can
Speaker 2: get quasi right answers from search results that Google itself
Speaker 2: barely maintains the quality of. It's a sound a bit
Speaker 2: frustrated because this is so strange. This is all so strange,
Speaker 2: this multi trillion dollar company, with this search engine that
Speaker 2: makes them tens of billions of dollars. They're just like,
Speaker 2: you know, just put the II on it. They'll love it.
Speaker 2: And it sent their stock ups, so I guess it
Speaker 2: doesn't bloody matter. But back to the regular results just
Speaker 2: for a moment. Google claims that in its recent Core
Speaker 2: update that they've helped reduce low quality and unhelpful content
Speaker 2: by forty five percent, and they're wrong. By the way,
Speaker 2: search is still dominated by search engine optimized content full
Speaker 2: of these links that are built to drive kickbacks to
Speaker 2: publishers called affiliate links, as well as YouTube links and
Speaker 2: Reddit links. And it's the very same content that informs
Speaker 2: and by the way, misinforms Google's generative results Google Search.
Speaker 2: It's just this lazy ugly product, and it lacks any nuance,
Speaker 2: it doesn't have ingenuity, and quite frankly, I'm beginning to
Speaker 2: question whether it even has any utility anymore. Searching for
Speaker 2: best laptop, and I mean this from Las Vegas, Nevada,
Speaker 2: beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada brings up this affiliate mine market
Speaker 2: funded tech site, and then a link to best Buy,
Speaker 2: then another affiliate funded site, then another link to best Buy,
Speaker 2: then a series of questions you can click through which
Speaker 2: say things like which brand of laptop is best? And
Speaker 2: when I click through the first one, by the way,
Speaker 2: it led me to a site called New Indian Express
Speaker 2: Deals and it's just full of affiliate marketing links, no
Speaker 2: real journalism of any kind. It's all. It could be
Speaker 2: AI generated. I have no idea, and it's tongues of
Speaker 2: these links to MacBooks and then things like a Techno
Speaker 2: megabook or the Honor Magic Book laptops that are not
Speaker 2: available in America. Yeah, you know. One might imagine that
Speaker 2: the point of a search company is that it searches
Speaker 2: the web for you, surfacing things that you might find
Speaker 2: interesting or informative that you might not find otherwise, highlighting
Speaker 2: individual publishers that make great content that otherwise might get
Speaker 2: lost in the churn of the Internet, which makes billions
Speaker 2: and billions of pages so much to find the great
Speaker 2: morass of the Web. That's what Google is meant to be.
Speaker 2: Yet the reality is that Google wants to highlight the
Speaker 2: same companies and the same publishers doing the same thing
Speaker 2: in the same way, because Google, at its core is
Speaker 2: a fundamentally lazy company that does not care about its customers.
Speaker 2: As it related in The Man Who Killed Google Search.
Speaker 2: Google's revenue arms are the ones pulling the levers at
Speaker 2: the company right now, and they demand more queries, as
Speaker 2: in more searches on the platform, even if doing so
Speaker 2: makes the platform so much worse, because when you optimize
Speaker 2: a platform for people to spend more time on it
Speaker 2: and click on things more, you're not actually resolving a
Speaker 2: query or a problem. I know, more queries are what
Speaker 2: they're looking for, but they're not talking about resolving queries.
Speaker 2: They're just looking for more of them so that they
Speaker 2: can show you more ads. But when you look at
Speaker 2: the state of Google right now, the current state of Google,
Speaker 2: you can see how these decisions have poisoned it. Google
Speaker 2: Search moves around its menus things like shopping images, news,
Speaker 2: and videos. Based on what you're searching for. It pumps
Speaker 2: results full of sponsored content YouTube videos. By the way,
Speaker 2: of course, they own youtubes. That's good for them. And
Speaker 2: then these arbitrarily chosen forum results, and then it deliberately
Speaker 2: offer scates what might be a paid for link. It's
Speaker 2: just this chaotically disorganized, nakedly manipulated piece of crap, let's
Speaker 2: be honest, and the search engine optimization industry is eating
Speaker 2: it alive. And it really isn't clear whether Google lacks
Speaker 2: the ability to fix it or just doesn't really care
Speaker 2: that much yet. The sorry state of Google Search did
Speaker 2: a little digging here might also be the result of
Speaker 2: Google distancing itself from the same search optimization community that
Speaker 2: I've been kind of harsh on. While SEO is a
Speaker 2: field that's inarguably harmed Google search results, it's also worth
Speaker 2: considering the outside of technical standards like how fast the
Speaker 2: site loads or whether it has a site map of
Speaker 2: its links. Google also kind of hides things from the
Speaker 2: SEO community. They offer scate what good looks like for
Speaker 2: fear that optimize, we'll use these standards to manipulate its results, which,
Speaker 2: by the way, happens anyway. So what Google does is,
Speaker 2: instead of saying what good would be and I've kind
Speaker 2: of been wrong here, they vaguely say, yeah, you should
Speaker 2: kind of do this, but I'm not going to tell
Speaker 2: you exactly how. And then you get these people who
Speaker 2: still manipulate anyway. It's so strange, this company worth trillions
Speaker 2: of dollars. They act like a plucky startup, but only
Speaker 2: when it comes to actual quality control. But nevertheless, I
Speaker 2: was quite interested in search optimization. So why you've got
Speaker 2: in Lily Rays, a fifteen year SEO veterrun, and she
Speaker 2: told me a really worrying story. I think that Google's
Speaker 2: kind of failing everybody. They're failing publishers, they're failing SEO people,
Speaker 2: and they're failing you and me. All right, so you've
Speaker 2: been in se over about fifteen years. But what actually
Speaker 2: is search engine optimization for a very basic listener who's
Speaker 2: never dealt with it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, search engine optimization is the practice of trying to
Speaker 1: make certain websites and the pages on those websites more
Speaker 1: visible in search engines, by which I mean ranking in
Speaker 1: the top positions on you know, Google Being or whatever
Speaker 1: other search engine you're targeting. Because that's really where the
Speaker 1: majority of people click on results.
Speaker 2: Isn't that a little bit manipulative of Google and these things?
Speaker 1: Is?
Speaker 2: How is that a good thing?
Speaker 1: So there's kind of a spectrum of approaches to SEO. There's,
Speaker 1: first of all, Google's own guidance related to how to
Speaker 1: do SEO in a way that I would argue is
Speaker 1: actually great for the Internet. I think most of the
Speaker 1: things that Google is recommending and that people like myself
Speaker 1: who do SEO professionally day in and day out, what
Speaker 1: we're doing is making websites more findable, more accessible, you know,
Speaker 1: loading more quickly for people to find what they're looking for.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of technical work that goes into that.
Speaker 1: But of course there's a whole other end of the spectrum,
Speaker 1: which is people trying to take advantage of the situation
Speaker 1: and spam things and manipulate search engines. So it depends
Speaker 1: which type of BESDEO you're talking about.
Speaker 2: So there are white hat SEO people, it's not just
Speaker 2: all absolutely absolutely, So what do you do for your job?
Speaker 2: What is the thing you make your customers do well?
Speaker 1: You know, companies come to us and they obviously want
Speaker 1: to get more visibility, So we have to look at
Speaker 1: all the different considerations and all the different factors that
Speaker 1: influence how people are able to find that content. A
Speaker 1: lot of it's technical, so literally a lot of our
Speaker 1: work is like, you know, focusing on page speed, focusing
Speaker 1: on overall accessibility. And you know, for example, if an
Speaker 1: image is uploaded to a website and it doesn't have
Speaker 1: image alt text, which is actually required for website accessibility,
Speaker 1: search engines can't understand what's on that image traditionally, so
Speaker 1: we have to go in there and kind of add
Speaker 1: the right words in. So it's making that content more findable.
Speaker 1: And again, a lot of that's technical, but a lot
Speaker 1: of that is content oriented. So people might write a
Speaker 1: certain article and in such a way that the way,
Speaker 1: you know, when people go to Google and they're looking
Speaker 1: for that article, they could never find it. So we're
Speaker 1: helping companies to kind of structure their content in the
Speaker 1: way where people can actually find what they're looking for.
Speaker 2: So you say that there are these signals, how much
Speaker 2: of that comes from the search engines themselves.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, the SEO field, because search engines are
Speaker 1: essentially a black box, and a lot of us are
Speaker 1: working with you know, just third party data or working
Speaker 1: the best we can with the analytics that Google any
Speaker 1: other search engines give us. A lot of this is guesswork,
Speaker 1: you know, we try to make informed guesses based on
Speaker 1: the data itself, but Google and the search engines do
Speaker 1: give us a lot of clues and a lot of
Speaker 1: insights about what we should be focusing on, especially when
Speaker 1: it comes to the technical thing, so you know, giving
Speaker 1: us guidance about what we call like canonical tags. There
Speaker 1: are different metadata that we have to add to a
Speaker 1: website for them to really be able to parse crawl
Speaker 1: through that website effectively. Those are direct signals that Google
Speaker 1: gives us that we work with. But a lot of
Speaker 1: it is kind of, you know, interpreting what we're seeing
Speaker 1: as far as what the data shows and then making
Speaker 1: informed guesses based on the history and on the analysis
Speaker 1: that we do for different clients.
Speaker 2: So based on how Google describes it, they're fairly communicative
Speaker 2: with web developers and sorry, web content creators, it doesn't
Speaker 2: actually sound like that is true.
Speaker 1: I would say when it comes to the technical side
Speaker 1: of things, Google's quite communicative. You know, it's really in
Speaker 1: their best interest to have web you know, fast websites
Speaker 1: websites that are accessible for users, websites that have a
Speaker 1: great user experience. And Google does a lot of developer conferences,
Speaker 1: a lot of communications on the technical side, and it's
Speaker 1: quite easy to, you know, kind of get in touch
Speaker 1: with them if you have a specific technical question, like
Speaker 1: for example, John Vieler hosts Webmaster hangouts on Google often,
Speaker 1: if not like several times per month where he answers
Speaker 1: a lot of people's questions. So, yes, technically speaking, I
Speaker 1: think they do provide a lot of guidance.
Speaker 2: About content because it seems like content, the actual things
Speaker 2: on the web page is the thing that actually matters here.
Speaker 2: Does Google give any guidance?
Speaker 1: They certainly do give guidance. They for example, they give
Speaker 1: a lot of questionnaires that site owners can follow when
Speaker 1: thinking about what Google considers helpful content. They also have
Speaker 1: something called the Search Quality Radar Guidelines, which is a
Speaker 1: document that you can find online. It's about maybe one
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty plus pages, and that's specifically used to
Speaker 1: inform Google's human Search Quality evaluator team as to what
Speaker 1: good content or bad content kind of looks like. So
Speaker 1: that's something that the SEO community looks at a lot
Speaker 1: as well. But to your point, you know, getting into
Speaker 1: granular questions about is this content good or bad for Google?
Speaker 1: What does helpful content mean? That's become trickier in the
Speaker 1: last few years because they can't tell us everything because
Speaker 1: people spam everything that they can get their hands on.
Speaker 2: Right, So it almost feels like a kind of battle. Yes, absolutely,
Speaker 2: but to this to this level, to this point you say,
Speaker 2: they give this this advice and they're vague on the
Speaker 2: content but direct on the technical. So how has Google
Speaker 2: search quality got so much worse?
Speaker 1: Then? There's so many different factors at play, you know,
Speaker 1: I think the reason why seos have a bad reputation
Speaker 1: in general, And to your question earlier, you know, is
Speaker 1: there such a thing as white hat seo. There's a
Speaker 1: huge spectrum of approaches and beliefs within the SEO space.
Speaker 1: For whatever reason, the people that spam Google the most
Speaker 1: are the ones that have been kind of creating this
Speaker 1: like the kind of the reputation that we have as
Speaker 1: an industry lately. And I get that because they've been
Speaker 1: quite successful. You know, a lot of people that are
Speaker 1: spamming Google, especially with AI lately, have have really made
Speaker 1: it into top positions, so they're getting a lot of
Speaker 1: visibility with those tactics. But you know, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of us that are doing work that again, it's like
Speaker 1: kind of advised by search engines to do because it
Speaker 1: really does make the Internet easier for everybody to use.
Speaker 1: Uh So that's been a challenge lately. I think that
Speaker 1: for whatever reason, you know, maybe because Google's shifted internally
Speaker 1: so much of its focus to AI lately. Obviously there's
Speaker 1: these big external challenges that Google's facing as a business lately,
Speaker 1: maybe they're they're not haven't been as focused on search
Speaker 1: quality for whatever reason. I don't actually have, you know,
Speaker 1: any type of evidence of that other than what I'm seeing,
Speaker 1: But I haven't seen as much spam and like SEO
Speaker 1: manipulation as I've seen over the last year or so.
Speaker 1: That being said, they're really cracking down on it in
Speaker 1: the last few months, so sometimes it just takes them
Speaker 1: a while to catch up.
Speaker 2: Something you've said publicly recently is real business is all
Speaker 2: being affected by the most recent Google updates? Can you
Speaker 2: kind of get into that, like who are the people
Speaker 2: being affected here?
Speaker 1: Yeah? I mean that's that's nothing new. I think, you know, Google,
Speaker 1: Google creates these algorithm updates multiple times big ones at
Speaker 1: least multiple times per year every year. And we've seen
Speaker 1: a lot of companies get caught up in those algorithm
Speaker 1: updates before. In most cases they're doing something that goes
Speaker 1: against Google's SEO or spam guidelines. The difference now is
Speaker 1: that there's a lot of these new types of algorithm
Speaker 1: updates that Google is launching that are affecting a lot
Speaker 1: in a lot of people in the publishing space, so
Speaker 1: both large and small publishers, especially smaller publishers over the
Speaker 1: last couple of years. And these are, for example, people
Speaker 1: that might have built a business doing travel blogging, doing
Speaker 1: recipe blogging, product reviews, and so if you do consider
Speaker 1: those people at business, and I think they would because
Speaker 1: they often have staff, they have people going to the
Speaker 1: places writing the travel reviews. Things like this, Google's dramatically
Speaker 1: reduce the visibility of how those sites appear on Google
Speaker 1: and the amount of traffic that they're getting.
Speaker 2: So when was the last major update to Google? Sometimes
Speaker 2: in March right, or it's unclear when it actually started
Speaker 2: and finish.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the last major update I would say was the
Speaker 1: March core update, which took forty five days to complete.
Speaker 1: But that started in early March and then ended in April.
Speaker 1: But there's been a few different aspects of that update
Speaker 1: in new spam policies that they've introduced as well, So
Speaker 1: we're actually still kind of in the middle of some
Speaker 1: of that rollout happening.
Speaker 2: Yet it's it's strange, though you and this is not
Speaker 2: on you, This is on Google. You say there's technical things,
Speaker 2: they say, there's quality things they say, but even recipe
Speaker 2: sites look terrible. They're full of ads there they make
Speaker 2: your phone so hot it burns you. Okay, maybe not
Speaker 2: that hot, but it feels like Google doesn't actually seem
Speaker 2: to be maintaining quality, and it seems like they almost
Speaker 2: fight those who do. An SEO, just how do you
Speaker 2: feel about your relationship with Google?
Speaker 1: It's hard to say right now. I think, you know,
Speaker 1: with something that's been very tricky for me is that
Speaker 1: I have a bit of a I've built a bit
Speaker 1: of a name for myself as the person that goes
Speaker 1: around and and really echoes a lot of what they
Speaker 1: recommend site owners do. That's been kind of my brand
Speaker 1: for the last several years. Google has different, you know,
Speaker 1: policies and things that they recommend to site owners that
Speaker 1: I have found, I would say, up until twenty twenty three,
Speaker 1: I've found those recommendations to be very consistent with the
Speaker 1: work that we're doing for our clients. So it's very
Speaker 1: easy for me to go say, yeah, what Google says
Speaker 1: to do is what works right, And we've worked with
Speaker 1: a lot of different companies and found those tactics and
Speaker 1: those recommendations to be very effective. The last few months,
Speaker 1: that's changed a bit for me. I'm not well, I'm
Speaker 1: not you know, my personal relationship with them is I
Speaker 1: want to be very careful to say, like, you know,
Speaker 1: the people that I know that that work at Google,
Speaker 1: and they you know, speak on behalf of Google, Like,
Speaker 1: this has nothing to do with them, right, This has
Speaker 1: to do with what's happening in the search results. And
Speaker 1: you know when I see ai spam ranking above my
Speaker 1: clients for what we call top stories, so that's you know,
Speaker 1: the news features on Google for example, or I see
Speaker 1: that in Google's new aioverviews is getting everything so many
Speaker 1: different things wrong, and there's spam and there's malware in there,
Speaker 1: like things like this. It's just it makes us as
Speaker 1: seos look bad because we then have to go defend
Speaker 1: those results to our clients and try to make sense
Speaker 1: of them. And that's been really challenging, very frustrating for
Speaker 1: me lately, because it's very hard to defend the quality
Speaker 1: of the search results when the search results are in
Speaker 1: a state of very poor quality.
Speaker 2: So you and you said previously up until twenty twenty three,
Speaker 2: was it what happened in twenty twenty four? Was it
Speaker 2: the core up they or was there just something that
Speaker 2: happened this year?
Speaker 1: Writ large, I think that probably the biggest change that
Speaker 1: happened was honestly chat GPT. That's there's one of many
Speaker 1: big changes. But the you know, not only chat Gypt
Speaker 1: but the different tools like it empowered spammers and sea
Speaker 1: alike to find new ways to speed up what they
Speaker 1: were doing and to create a lot of terrible content
Speaker 1: at scale. And that worked extremely well for a year
Speaker 1: because guess what, it takes Google and the other search
Speaker 1: engines a while to kind of figure out what they're
Speaker 1: doing to develop new algorithms and new spam policies that
Speaker 1: you know, devalue or demote that type of content. But
Speaker 1: there was about a year where that content was succeeding
Speaker 1: extremely well. So towards the end of twenty twenty three,
Speaker 1: you would see a ton of AI generated spam and
Speaker 1: the search results and people using AI tools in new
Speaker 1: and different ways to just accelerate whatever spamming they were doing.
Speaker 2: Do you think Google actually has control of search or
Speaker 2: has it just kind of got out of hand.
Speaker 1: I think they you know, they had these new set
Speaker 1: of updates beginning in March twenty twenty four where I
Speaker 1: think that they made loud and clear that they're not
Speaker 1: messing around. You know, they really cracked down on a
Speaker 1: lot of sites that were doing a lot of different
Speaker 1: SEO tactics and spam tactics. So I do think they're
Speaker 1: getting controlled back. I do actually also think they kind
Speaker 1: of overstepped in some areas and there's a lot of
Speaker 1: collateral damage there as well, which I know they're working on.
Speaker 1: And that's where you hear a lot of people saying,
Speaker 1: you know, this destroyed my business because there were a
Speaker 1: lot of people that just had no idea that they
Speaker 1: were going to get caught up in that. So that's
Speaker 1: on the search side. I think, you know, Google's proven
Speaker 1: time and time again that they can eventually get ahead
Speaker 1: of it. But I think they're presented with a lot
Speaker 1: of new and different challenges right now on the AI side.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm sure eventually they'll figure it out, or
Speaker 1: this AI overview thing will get better over time. But
Speaker 1: it's been quite interesting to see publicly this week, so
Speaker 1: many examples of Google's new AI overviews getting information blatantly wrong.
Speaker 2: I want to push back a little bit about the
Speaker 2: control over search that Google has. The reason I asked
Speaker 2: that is it's not been just chat GPT going back
Speaker 2: to twenty twenty. Results have been bad for a long time,
Speaker 2: and it feels that Google is fighting SEO, and SEO
Speaker 2: I realized is a much wider umbrella because there's people
Speaker 2: trying to do the web properly. There's people who were
Speaker 2: just trying to mess with Google, and then there are
Speaker 2: the people who just don't care and are spamming. It's
Speaker 2: just it doesn't feel like they're able to make quick changes,
Speaker 2: and I just don't understand it. It drives me insane, honestly.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, well, one of the other things that I
Speaker 1: didn't mention that's been a big change to the quality
Speaker 1: of search results, and one of the big complaints that
Speaker 1: people are having is a lot of big sites with
Speaker 1: a lot of authority on Google a lot of SEO history,
Speaker 1: A lot of the big publishers that we all know,
Speaker 1: you know, big brands that everybody's familiar with, found a
Speaker 1: lot of SEO opportunities in the last couple of years
Speaker 1: that have worked splendidly for them. So, for example, affiliate content.
Speaker 1: You might have noticed that nearly every big publisher on
Speaker 1: the Internet has ventured into product reviews in the last
Speaker 1: couple of years, and that's because it's a huge money maker.
Speaker 1: So one of the big complaints that people have is like,
Speaker 1: it's not fair that X, y Z big publisher shows
Speaker 1: up every time I'm typing best running shoes for women
Speaker 1: or whatever the keyword is, and believe it or not,
Speaker 1: you know this. I think this has been one of
Speaker 1: the biggest complaints that people have had. But in the
Speaker 1: last two or three months, Google is cracking down on
Speaker 1: that in a very big way. I think it's just
Speaker 1: taking them a long time to figure out specifically how
Speaker 1: to target that.
Speaker 2: Why do you think it takes them so long? They're
Speaker 2: worth like two trillion, they surely they have the people.
Speaker 1: I wonder the same things myself. Sometimes I'm not a
Speaker 1: search ranking engineer, so I don't know why I also,
Speaker 1: I think you know better than I do what's going
Speaker 1: on internally at their company right now. I think there's
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot of kind of pandemonium in
Speaker 1: different ways. I don't know, but it seems that way.
Speaker 2: But that being yeah, go on, you go on.
Speaker 1: I was just gonna say, another reason why this is
Speaker 1: so difficult for them to target is because not all
Speaker 1: of this is easy to spot algorithmically. For example, if
Speaker 1: a publisher decides to start working with third party contributors
Speaker 1: who are contributing product review content, those relationships are not
Speaker 1: always entirely clear to a point where an algorithm wouldn't
Speaker 1: necessarily be able to figure that out. So Google has
Speaker 1: to use a variety of different methods to demote that
Speaker 1: content and learn about those business relationships, and you can't
Speaker 1: just solve that all algorithmically.
Speaker 2: Do you think they want to solve it?
Speaker 1: I would imagine yeah, they want to do it algorithmically
Speaker 1: instead of using their web spam team. But currently they're
Speaker 1: using their web spam teams. So that's real human beings
Speaker 1: that are sending out what they call manual actions or
Speaker 1: penalties to sites that are engaged in different types of
Speaker 1: spam policies, and they've created some new ones recently.
Speaker 2: It just feels like they could I say this not
Speaker 2: as an SEO expert, but it feels like they could
Speaker 2: do very obvious things. They could go and go with
Speaker 2: dot Meredith, who has the met who you read, Hello
Speaker 2: House Read is whole thing around how Meredith has been
Speaker 2: basically spamming affiliate marketing content that's not particularly well done,
Speaker 2: and you've written about this as well. It feels that
Speaker 2: they could just do something to them immediately that why
Speaker 2: don't they take these fast actions because it doesn't seem
Speaker 2: like they're doing much anyway.
Speaker 1: Well, a lot of these publishers have content that a
Speaker 1: lot of people really love, and you know, Google has
Speaker 1: a lot of signals that indicate that these are, you know,
Speaker 1: sites that produce extremely helpful content in a lot of
Speaker 1: different categories. So it's not so easy to say this
Speaker 1: category of the website is not okay by users, but
Speaker 1: this one is. You know, it starts to become tricky
Speaker 1: when they have to go after certain sections of a website.
Speaker 1: You know, a lot of times with sites that are
Speaker 1: just doing pure spam, it'll be the whole site that's
Speaker 1: doing spam. But these are obviously not to mention these
Speaker 1: are very very big brands. You can't you can't remove
Speaker 1: a site from Google or demote a site from Google,
Speaker 1: for if it's a brand that people are looking for
Speaker 1: and a brand that people would expect to see, right,
Speaker 1: because that may mean you can sort.
Speaker 2: Of well, it's kind of I think what I'm what
Speaker 2: I'm getting at is what they judge is good for
Speaker 2: the Internet doesn't necessarily seem so because there's a self
Speaker 2: fulfilling prophecy there there is, Oh, this is popular with
Speaker 2: a bunch of people. Well maybe it's popular because Google
Speaker 2: made it popular. Maybe it's not. Actually it's just an
Speaker 2: algorithmic choice. But I'll get I'll get onto something a
Speaker 2: little more direct, which is, how do you feel about AI.
Speaker 1: Search, like Google's new AI overviews?
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, sge Yes, that's generative experience.
Speaker 1: It's like, obviously we're in a big transition moment where
Speaker 1: you know, speaking about it now is not reflective of
Speaker 1: what it's going to look like in six months. So
Speaker 1: I always want to be cognizant of like this thing
Speaker 1: changes every single day. My biggest issue with it, so
Speaker 1: first of all, Google made it public, you know, a
Speaker 1: week ago, at Google Io, and myself and many others
Speaker 1: have been experimenting with it in Google Labs for a
Speaker 1: year before that, and in theory, you know, with AI,
Speaker 1: it should be improving and learning and getting better every day, right.
Speaker 1: For a year, myself and many others were raising flags
Speaker 1: about quality issues and also the fact that we just
Speaker 1: didn't feel like it often provided that much of an
Speaker 1: improvement to the existing search results. For example, Google already
Speaker 1: had featured snippets, so if they want to take a
Speaker 1: paragraph or a snippet from somebody's website and display that
Speaker 1: directly in the search results, there was already a mechanism
Speaker 1: for that. So for the past year, you know, I've
Speaker 1: raised a million different examples of when it got things wrong.
Speaker 1: When I think it was, you know, responding to some
Speaker 1: type of super controversial question in a weird way, whatever
Speaker 1: it was. And when they launched it, you know, literally
Speaker 1: I can tell you because I spent my whole life
Speaker 1: at SEO conferences. Most of us were like, there's no
Speaker 1: way they can launch this thing in its current form,
Speaker 1: like it's just so not ready, right, And they did,
Speaker 1: And here we are a week later, and nearly every
Speaker 1: you know, social media site has tons of examples of
Speaker 1: people wanting to it off, the tons of examples of
Speaker 1: it getting things wrong. So you know, I want to
Speaker 1: be cognizant and respectful the fact that it will change,
Speaker 1: it will get better. I'm just quite surprised that they
Speaker 1: launched it in its current form when they did.
Speaker 2: One last question And don't take this the wrong way,
Speaker 2: but why do you think they'll improve, because the last
Speaker 2: few years have shown that they've got worse.
Speaker 1: Well, in theory, these AI lm should learn and improve
Speaker 1: and get better and get retrained all the time. I'm
Speaker 1: going off with that optimistic idea. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: it's like we're doing, you know, offloading this work onto
Speaker 1: Google searchers and relying on them to provide feedback and
Speaker 1: everything is I guess it doesn't necessarily mean it's going
Speaker 1: to go in the right direction. So it's a good point.
Speaker 1: It's hard to say.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just it feels almost like the AI side
Speaker 2: is getting away from what search is meant to do,
Speaker 2: because search is meant to help you find useful things,
Speaker 2: and this doesn't even seem to be capable of helping
Speaker 2: you find the right answer, let alone a good link.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think The main issue that I currently have
Speaker 1: with it is that once I know that it's twenty
Speaker 1: or ten percent wrong or whatever whatever the number is,
Speaker 1: we don't know the actual percentage of wrong answers. You know,
Speaker 1: based on how many we've already seen in the last week,
Speaker 1: it's quite a lot. So when people know that this
Speaker 1: thing has a tendency to be wrong, will they trust it? Right?
Speaker 1: And what does that do for trust and Google overall?
Speaker 1: Because with featured snippets, at least you can say, Okay,
Speaker 1: this comes from this website, you can blame that website
Speaker 1: because they pull that data verbatim. When they're showing a
Speaker 1: featured snippet with.
Speaker 2: Air or reviews.
Speaker 1: It's like there's a tendency that one of these sentences
Speaker 1: is completely wrong, and it's pulled from an eleven year
Speaker 1: old Breddit threat that was making a joke, and we
Speaker 1: just don't know which sentence it is right.
Speaker 2: Right. It just it feels like they're almost moving against
Speaker 2: the Internet. It's just a very very depressing thing to watch.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree. I mean I think I would have
Speaker 1: expected this thing to be more fact, more evidence based
Speaker 1: in its rollout. I would have expected it to show
Speaker 1: for far fewer queries where getting things wrong is extremely dangerous.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I mean, I like, our industry now is
Speaker 1: digging into the data and we're finding that it seems
Speaker 1: like health is actually one of the categories where AI
Speaker 1: already is triggered the most health topics.
Speaker 2: That's genuinely scary. But okay, actual lost question here, What
Speaker 2: is the thing that Google could change to get better?
Speaker 1: Huh? I mean, I would imagine they're they're working on
Speaker 1: a lot of the feedback that they've gotten in the
Speaker 1: last week with the AI over reviews and finding a
Speaker 1: lot of examples where it gets things wrong. And if
Speaker 1: they're going to continue with aio reviews, I would hope
Speaker 1: that they dramatically improve the product as quickly as possible.
Speaker 1: That's on the AI front. I mean, if if you
Speaker 1: want to be if you want to.
Speaker 2: Completely in general with search, Yeah, with.
Speaker 1: With search, I think that they should reassess this notion
Speaker 1: of helpful content because I think that they've inadvertently caused
Speaker 1: a lot of sites that are truly producing helpful, experience
Speaker 1: driven content to lose a lot of visibility in the
Speaker 1: last year or so, and a lot of like you know,
Speaker 1: we're still seeing a lot of big brands seemingly able
Speaker 1: to show up for every possible query, and we're not
Speaker 1: hearing enough from small publishers. We're not giving small publishers
Speaker 1: enough of a chance for their content to compete, and
Speaker 1: they're kind of At this point, Google's just seems to
Speaker 1: be blasting Reddit everywhere for everything, maybe as a solution
Speaker 1: to that, because yeah, you get a lot of firsthand
Speaker 1: experience from Reddit, but I'm not sure that putting Reddit
Speaker 1: in top positions for so many different queries is a
Speaker 1: solution either. So personally, I'd like to see a broader
Speaker 1: diversity of the types of websites that are able to compete.
Speaker 2: The problem, it seems, is that this multi trillion dollar
Speaker 2: tech company, one that has a monopoly over the Internet's information,
Speaker 2: is somehow we can we can power us when faced
Speaker 2: with people that create websites specifically to trick it, Google,
Speaker 2: a company that sells to militaries and governments and professional
Speaker 2: sports leagues that makes tens of billions of dollars a
Speaker 2: quarter and employs nearly two hundred thousand people, is incapable
Speaker 2: of thwarting a hodgepodge industry full of nakedly craven bad actors,
Speaker 2: or they just un willing to intervene because it Google
Speaker 2: doesn't really care about anything other than how many times
Speaker 2: people search and how many ads they see, And they
Speaker 2: don't really mind if maybe this big mess of crap
Speaker 2: makes the whole thing worse. This problem, it's been going
Speaker 2: on for years, and I feel crazy every time I
Speaker 2: talk about Google Search as a product and has a
Speaker 2: business that's such an incredibly profitable and ubiquitous product can
Speaker 2: be it's so utterly shoddy and regularly unfit for the task,
Speaker 2: I feel insane. I feel crazy when I see article
Speaker 2: after article about Sandhar Pushai and Google talking about the
Speaker 2: remarkable success of Google, yet never the fact that they've
Speaker 2: done so much to damage this search engine, and they've
Speaker 2: so blatantly destroyed their core product. And what really upsets
Speaker 2: me is the sheer contempt that Google seems to have
Speaker 2: for its customers. Google Search is awful. It's a terrible,
Speaker 2: unreliable product, and now they've made it even less reliable
Speaker 2: with the introduction of Generatifai. And yet sun Dar Pushai,
Speaker 2: the CEO of Google, can stride into interviews all piss
Speaker 2: and vinegar and ramble about how evalues independent sources and
Speaker 2: more authentic voices as his service continually fails the surface
Speaker 2: unique interesting or useful content. Nil Patel of The Verge
Speaker 2: got a lot of credit for giving Peshai a tough interview,
Speaker 2: but I'm gonna be bloody honest, paper Tiger. It's just
Speaker 2: another opportunity for a Google executive to vaguely suggest that
Speaker 2: they care about search without really being held accountable. The
Speaker 2: question is, sun Dar, why is Google so bad? Now?
Speaker 2: And he will give you some vague pr spiel. Show
Speaker 2: him results. Nille did show him Chromebook results. The thing
Speaker 2: to do would be come with a few results and
Speaker 2: show him in front of him and say why is
Speaker 2: this so bad? Why? Sun Dar? And if you can
Speaker 2: get him to say on the record, actually, I think
Speaker 2: it's good. That says everything. What it says is he's
Speaker 2: a liar and he doesn't really care. But I guess
Speaker 2: the interview did that anyway. Look, the problem, other than
Speaker 2: the fact that Google should be broken up and that
Speaker 2: search should be a public utility or a nonprofit, is
Speaker 2: that the media seems to continually lack the ability to
Speaker 2: simplify the problem. Google Search is bad, and it's been
Speaker 2: bad for a while. Results are worse. They're full of
Speaker 2: spam and low quality content. Google does a terrible job
Speaker 2: of maintaining the content on Google Search, and it's now
Speaker 2: introduced an AI to search through these results. That makes
Speaker 2: things worse by generating answers based on search results from
Speaker 2: a search engine that's rotting in real time, and then
Speaker 2: it hallucinates the results. Anyway, Eh God, I apologize them
Speaker 2: getting a little bit head up, but this whole thing
Speaker 2: just it kills me. It makes me feel a little
Speaker 2: bit nuts because if any of us, anyone listening to this,
Speaker 2: went into our jobs and our trousers were down and
Speaker 2: our our bits were out, and we were walking in,
Speaker 2: and we go in and we half do our job
Speaker 2: and the job's terribly done, would we get fired? We
Speaker 2: get fired. I think we'd get fired, maybe if the
Speaker 2: crap work we did made money, but we'd still be
Speaker 2: in trouble for our willies hanging out. And that's the thing.
Speaker 2: None of these tech executives, even when faced with the media,
Speaker 2: seemed to actually be held accountable. And Google acts without integrity,
Speaker 2: and they just act with this stunning contempt for their customers.
Speaker 2: I've said it before, but it bears repeating. Suned up
Speaker 2: a shite is a goddamn management concern, a former McKinsey
Speaker 2: free with little interest in providing users with any kind
Speaker 2: of usable service, and his cronies people like Probagara, Ragavan
Speaker 2: and Liz Read. By the way, Probagara has been upgraded
Speaker 2: to head of a bunch of things now and Liz
Speaker 2: Read is now the head of Search. It's so good
Speaker 2: he picked his successor, and it's so good that this
Speaker 2: person loves Ai. And these people they've continually helped Google
Speaker 2: put out bad software, all in pursuit of perpetual growth.
Speaker 2: And I believe they're part of a larger problem in
Speaker 2: the tech industry. Tech firms are no longer building things
Speaker 2: for customers. Big tech and honestly, far too many startups.
Speaker 2: They're creating these products that are more like symbolic capital
Speaker 2: for investors so that they can place bets on them
Speaker 2: and say, ah, maybe red war here, no, maybe black
Speaker 2: this time, maybe double zero, And these things they only
Speaker 2: exist to express meteoric growth ten x, twenty x, thirty
Speaker 2: x returns things that sound satisfying for people to chirp
Speaker 2: on CNBC without ever actually really having to provide the service.
Speaker 2: They're discussing I'm not to be honest, it's breaking my arm.
Speaker 2: As I said in my last episode, I'm not a pessimist.
Speaker 2: I'm more of a broken heared romantic. There was a time,
Speaker 2: and it wasn't super long ago, that tech was exciting
Speaker 2: and fun and interesting. When things came out that subtly
Speaker 2: or revertedly, they changed our lives, They made things better,
Speaker 2: they maybe connected us, or they made our time on
Speaker 2: our own better and more substantive, and things felt like
Speaker 2: they were progressing. Yet it feels like so much of
Speaker 2: today's tech industry is focused on shipping products that nobody
Speaker 2: asked for to fix problems that don't exist, all while
Speaker 2: demanding applause for a future that they've yet to make
Speaker 2: a reality. Cryptocurrency, the metaverse, now generative AI. They're all
Speaker 2: trends that built this kind of pseudo religious movement to
Speaker 2: carry water for products that didn't do what they said.
Speaker 2: They would guilt tripping those that said otherwise for not
Speaker 2: being optimistic enough about an industry there's continually failed to
Speaker 2: give us hope for the future, and it's disgraceful. It's disgraceful.
Speaker 2: Look at Facebook from my last episodes. Look at that website,
Speaker 2: that multi billion dollar website. Look how bad it is.
Speaker 2: Look how full it's of AI, spam and junk it is.
Speaker 2: Look how unsafe it is. Look at Google right now.
Speaker 2: Google Search is falling. Apart of the seams. It kind
Speaker 2: of works and sometimes it does, don't get me wrong,
Speaker 2: but for the most part you just can't trust it
Speaker 2: any more. And that was before they plugged generative AI
Speaker 2: into it. Now the world's probably the world's most profitable
Speaker 2: tech product is just languishing. It's so much worse. And
Speaker 2: what's crazy is I don't even know how they're gonna
Speaker 2: make money from it because these AI results they don't
Speaker 2: seem to connect to ads or anything. They don't seem
Speaker 2: to make Google money. But because Sandha Peshei needs to
Speaker 2: convince Wall Street that Google will grow forever, well, you
Speaker 2: gotta put AI in it, man, You gotta make the
Speaker 2: AI happen. Except regular people using this, they're gonna get misinformed.
Speaker 2: Someone's gonna die. And I really sound dramatic, I know,
Speaker 2: but they are because people use Google Search and rely
Speaker 2: on Google Search. They rely on Google Search to give
Speaker 2: them real answers to real queries. And we can laugh
Speaker 2: about the fact it said that someone had to eat
Speaker 2: a rock a day. But what if they're trying to
Speaker 2: put out a chemical fire. What if they're depressed then
Speaker 2: they ask Google something and Google tells them, I don't know,
Speaker 2: some sort of weird CBD treatment because Google got poisoned
Speaker 2: by an AI spam result. There is, by the way,
Speaker 2: a fake result about Google telling someone to jump off
Speaker 2: the gong Gate Bridge. It's very fake, done for for it.
Speaker 2: But seriously, though, something like that's going to happen. And yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm sure someone will say, oh, it's just an edge case.
Speaker 2: I don't give a crap an edge case where someone
Speaker 2: dies or is harmed or is misinformed. That's not worth it.
Speaker 2: It's not worth it. And these companies must learn. And
Speaker 2: I think what's going to happen is far simpler. I
Speaker 2: think they believe that people are just going to keep
Speaker 2: using it because they have these horrible monopolies. I think
Speaker 2: at some point people are just not going to use
Speaker 2: search at all. I think that is the actual end
Speaker 2: result here. I think you see open AI create search
Speaker 2: engine and it kind of is worse than this. I
Speaker 2: think you're going to see a proliferation of this tech
Speaker 2: as people desperately try and catch up with Google and
Speaker 2: it's so distressing, it's so insulting to customers, turns my
Speaker 2: bloody stomach. I realized this wasn't a very positive podcast,
Speaker 2: but hope it filled in the gaps for you. Thanks
Speaker 2: for listening, Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The
Speaker 2: editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Metasowski.
Speaker 2: You can check out more of his music and audio
Speaker 2: projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T.
Speaker 1: T O.
Speaker 2: S O w Ski dot com. You can email me
Speaker 2: at easy at Better Offline dot com or visit Better
Speaker 2: Offline dot com to find more podcast links and of course,
Speaker 2: my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat
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Speaker 2: Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a
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