AI Is Breaking Google

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2:09Better Offline Hey, you ever wonder who ruined Google? Well, the answer is Prabhagar Raghavan, Google's former head of ads, who led a coup to run Google search, which led to websites decay. Now, I'm not just recounting my own work here. My source is Google Search. No, really, really. Search who ruined Google on Google Search, and it will pop up with an AI-generated summary of multiple articles that cite a piece I wrote called The Man Who Killed Google Search. Why? Because on May 14th, 2024, Google decided in their incredible wisdom to add generative artificial intelligence to search results. These new AI-generated results, dubbed Google's search-generative experience, replace the initial links you'll see on some pages with an AI overview, one generated by scraping the text of other websites so that Google can answer your questions without you having to visit them, and consequently give them any ad revenue.

3:07It's very strange, but also, you may be thinking, isn't generative AI the thing that regularly gets things wrong and is kind of unreliable and everyone knows about that? Google wouldn't do that, right? Wrong! McKinsey alumnus and Google CEO Sundar Pichai told The Verge's Nilay Patel that he believes these results will actually help the web. I'd argue otherwise. These generative results will only help centralise the web's information around these big publishers that Google likes, all while creating less of a need for anybody to visit the rest of the internet as in any of the other links, even if they're presented along an AI-generated summary.

3:47As Lauren Good of Wyatt said in a recent piece about Google's new shift to AI, by choosing when and where these overviews appear, Google is essentially deciding what is or is not a complex question, and then they're making a judgment on what kind of web content should inform its summaries, as well as what content you're actually going to see or learn from. Yet these articles are also predicated on one very, very, very silly assumption, and I really respect Lauren and Nilay, but seriously, you're making one major mistake. You're assuming that Google actually cares about building and maintaining a good search engine.

4:21Though it's been fixed since I wrote this script, you used to, as in a few days ago, be able to ask Google if there was a country in Africa that began with the letter K, and it would have resulted in the generative result that says, as of September 2021, no African country begins with the letter K. However, Kenya is the closest African country to starting with a K sound, with two citations, a forum post from 2021 that quoted a hallucination from ChatGPT, and a website titled, countries that start with the letter K, with the very first sentence beginning with Kenya. Google's generative search results have also recently said that one could use Elmer's glue to keep cheese from sliding off of a pizza, or that a dog played in the NBA, or that something called a squat plug is a device that helps keep the glutes tight while squatting, rather than a joke scraped from a Reddit post about a very, very specific kind of sex toy.

5:13Do not look it up. You do not need to know. These results, by the way, have already been taken care of because of the massive shitstorm that Google is dealing with from the very obvious mistake they've made and will continue to make. It's very upsetting. And these results are a result of a modified version of Google's Gemini Generative AI, their equivalent of ChatGPT, generating answers based on the content of web pages. And these web pages can include everything. I'm talking news outlets, random blogs, posts from Reddit. And it's just this vile new strategy where, and I'm quoting the new head of search, Liz Reed, you're allowing Google to do the Googling for you.

5:57Now, this is, of course, a really horrible idea for many, many reasons. As I've mentioned repeatedly in the past, generative AI has this tendency to hallucinate, where it authoritatively states something that just is not true, mostly because these models don't actually know anything. Generative AI like Gemini or ChatGPT or Anthropics Claude or Meta's Llama, they're all responding to your queries by predicting what the most likely to be correct answer is based on parameters that they learned in their training data, which means that Google's AI-powered search is Googling for you with absolutely no comprehension or intellectual understanding or really any read of the content itself.

6:38As a result, all it's able to do is say, okay, all right, these phrases seem to make up what the right answer could be based on mathematics, and these links seem to include these phrases, so I guess that's fine, which is why Google briefly recommended that you eat one rock a day because it was generating an answer from the satirical newspaper, The Onion. Google's response was to tell The Verge's Kylie Robeson that these were generally very uncommon queries that are not representative of most people's experience, specifically responding to Robeson's own query where Google told her that the mammal with the most bones was a python.

7:15Just to be clear, a python is a reptile. They do have bones, though, fun fact. Now, as funny as these results might be, Google's AI-powered search is really horrible for the internet at large. By summarising other people's links to generate an answer, Google's effectively stolen the internet, picking and choosing what parts it deems worthy of showing you, and then providing this kind of hackneyed, hallucination-prone summary of what they think the links mean. Google's already positioned itself as a gatekeeper of the internet, by the way. They're meant to be the steward of what's important, and important is the word that they used in the original paper to describe page rank, which is how they rank pages.

7:55And the theoretical value exchange was that we get reliable, safe results that actually answered our queries. But AI-powered searches, they kind of turn Google into a source of truth and not a remotely reliable one. And they're using a technology that is well known for getting things wrong. Now, you may think, well, surely Google would be both aware of this. And even if they, even if they're aware of it they would they wouldn't put this hallucination prone tech in deliberately right surely this must be some kind of mistake and you are wrong because sandar pashai told nilay patel in an interview that happened early last week that they're well aware of the problem of hallucinations and that they were still unsolved and that they were an inherent feature of large language models sandar you're completely correct at which point the ceo of google said that large language models were good because of this and that in fact it made them very creative sander what the hell are you talking about man i don't need google to be creative i need google to answer my bloody question when you say someone's being creative with the truth you're describing someone lying oh my god i feel like i'm anyway anyway it's extremely obvious how dangerous this strategy is.

9:17Generative AI could hallucinate, I don't know, how to deal with a chemical fire or a mental health issue or authoritatively misinform somebody that, say, I don't know, Barack Obama was a Muslim, which is an actual generative result that Google has since removed. Billions of people, regular, non-technical people, people that don't live on social media in the swill and constantly see the new news, they rely on Google every day to answer questions, and they're going to assume that a multi-trillion dollar tech company would not turn the most well-trafficked source of information in the bloody world over to an AI.

9:53And Peter Kafka over at Business Insider actually put this really well. He said it's like the difference between being handed a map and being given directions that will send your car barreling over a cliff. I won't mince words. Google's AI-powered search is a goddamn travesty, both for the internet and for society at large. By choosing what queries to summarize and what sites to pull from, Google both centralizes and polarizes the world's information, all while depriving actual publishers of traffic, the actual human beings creating the things that inform their search engine. And it's horrible.

10:30That alone is such a horrible problem. Now, of course, Sundar Pashai told Nilay Patel, who just went, yeah, sure, mate, okay. no pushback man he told them no this is actually good for the web because people will get the answers and then they'll click through yeah let me give you an example of how wrong you are sundar look at social media look at when people see clickbait do you think people go i should check the link this could be used to get engagement for my tweet no they tweet the thing and get mad about it i've done this within the last 24 hours i'm an idiot but still people are not going to be curious they're going to assume that Google search is not full of nonsense, that Google search is not spitting out AI-generated summaries using hallucination-prone AI.

11:16I feel like I'm going crazy. Anyway, while AI results cite their sources, it's just foolish to believe that regular people are going to click through to the results when Google itself has already answered the question, especially on service-driven queries that answer, say, whether a food is safe or some sort of factual question. Publishers, especially news outlets already heavily dependent on Google Search traffic, they're terrified that these summaries will further reduce traffic at a time when social networks, like Facebook for example, are no longer really sending them readers. And let's be honest, Google Search has already deteriorated drastically over the last few years, and its results are plagued with AI-generated spam and search engine-optimized nonsense, and these results overwhelm good, unique, authoritative content.

12:06To the point that major newspapers have put out public service announcements, like the Wall Street Journal, by the way, about how to avoid scams in the very first results you see on Google. Now, you'd think that this deluge of bad press would make Google say, huh, we should fix Google search. We should make things better. No, no, no, no, no. That's not what we do here at Google. No, Google plugged in an already unreliable artificial intelligence into a product that it's deliberately allowed to decay so that customers can get quasi-right answers from search results that Google itself barely maintains the quality of.

12:45I sound a bit frustrated because this is so strange. This is all so strange. This multi-trillion dollar company with this search engine that makes them tens of billions of dollars, they're just like, you know, just put the AI on it. They'll love it. And it sent their stock up, so I guess it doesn't bloody matter. But back to the regular results, just for a moment. Google claims that in its recent core update that they've helped reduce low quality and unhelpful content by 45%. And they're wrong, by the way. Search is still dominated by search engine optimized content, full of these links that are built to drive kickbacks to publishers called affiliate links, as well as YouTube links and Reddit links.

13:28And it's the very same content that informs and, by the way, misinforms Google's generative results. Google search, it's just this lazy, ugly product, and it lacks any nuance. It doesn't have ingenuity. And quite frankly, I'm beginning to question whether it even has any utility anymore. Searching for best laptop, and I mean this from Las Vegas, Nevada, beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, brings up this affiliate marketing funded tech site and then a link to Best Buy, then another affiliate funded site, then another link to Best Buy, then a series of questions you can click through, which say things like, which brand of laptop is best?

14:03And when I clicked through the first one, by the way, it led me to a site called New Indian Express Deals. And it's just full of affiliate marketing links. No real journalism of any kind. It's all, it could be AI generated. I have no idea. and it's tons of these links to MacBooks and then things like a Techno Megabook or the Honor Magic Book, laptops that are not available in America. Yeah, you know, one might imagine that the point of a search company is that it searches the web for you, surfacing things that you might find interesting or informative that you might not find otherwise, highlighting individual publishers that make great content that otherwise might get lost in the churn of the internet, which makes billions and billions of pages, so much to find, the great morass of the web.

14:50That's what Google is meant to be. Yet the reality is that Google wants to highlight the same companies and the same publishers doing the same thing in the same way because Google, at its core, is a fundamentally lazy company that does not care about its customers. As I related in The Man Who Killed Google Search, Google's revenue arms are the ones pulling the levers at the company right now, and they demand more queries, as in more searches on the platform. Even if doing so makes the platform so much worse, because when you optimize a platform for people to spend more time on it and click on things more, you're not actually resolving a query or a problem.

15:30I know more queries are what they're looking for, but they're not talking about resolving queries. They're just looking for more of them so that they can show you more ads. But when you look at the state of Google right now, the current state of Google, you can see how these decisions have poisoned it. Google search moves around its menus, things like shopping, images, news, and videos, based on what you're searching for. It pumps results full of sponsored content, YouTube videos, by the way, of course they own YouTube, so that's good for them, and then these arbitrarily chosen forum results, and then it deliberately obfuscates what might be a paid-for link.

16:05It's just this chaotically disorganized, nakedly manipulated piece of crap, Let's be honest. And the search engine optimization industry has eaten it alive. And it really isn't clear whether Google lacks the ability to fix it or just doesn't really care that much. Yet the sorry state of Google search, did a little digging here, might also be the result of Google distancing itself from the same search optimization community that I've been kind of harsh on. While SEO is a field that's inarguably harmed Google's search results, it's also worth considering that outside of technical standards like how fast the site loads or whether it has a site map of its links google also kind of hides things from the seo community they obfuscate what good looks like for fear that optimizers will use these standards to manipulate its results which by the way happens anyway so what google does is instead of saying what good would be and i've kind of been wrong here they vaguely say yeah you should kind of do this, but I'm not going to tell you exactly how.

17:07And then you get these people who still manipulate anyway. It's so strange. This company worth trillions of dollars, they act like a plucky startup, but only when it comes to actual quality control. But nevertheless, I was quite interested in search optimization. So I got in Lily Ray, who's a 15-year SEO veteran, and she told me a really worrying story. I think that Google's kind of failing everybody. They're failing publishers, they're failing SEO people, and they're failing you and me.

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19:30That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash better. Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash better. All right. So you've been in SEO for about 15 years, but what actually is search engine optimization for a very basic listener who's never dealt with it? Yeah, search engine optimization is the practice of trying to make certain websites and the pages on those websites more visible in search engines, by which I mean ranking in the top positions on Google, Bing, or whatever other search engine you're targeting, because that's really where the majority of people click on results. Isn't that a little bit manipulative of Google and these things?

20:18How is that a good thing? So there's kind of a spectrum of approaches to SEO. There's first of all, Google's own guidance related to how to do SEO in a way that I would argue is actually great for the internet. I think most of the things that Google is recommending and that people like myself who do SEO professionally day in and day out, what we're doing is making websites more findable, more accessible, you know, loading more quickly, easier for people to find what they're looking for. There's a lot of technical work that goes into that. But of course, there's the whole other end of the spectrum, which is people trying to take advantage of the situation and spam things and manipulate the search engine.

20:57So it depends which type of SEO you're talking about. So there are white hat SEO people. It's not just all people. Absolutely. So what do you do for your job? What is the thing you make your customers do? Well, you know, companies come to us and they obviously want to get more visibility. So we have to look at all the different considerations and all the different factors that influence how people are able to find that content. A lot of it's technical. So literally a lot of our work is like, you know, focusing on page speed, focusing on overall accessibility. And, you know, for example, if an image is uploaded to a website that doesn't have image alt text, which is actually required for website accessibility, search engines can't understand what's on that image traditionally.

21:43So we have to go in there and kind of add the right words in. So it's making that content more findable. And again, a lot of that's technical, but a lot of that is content oriented. So people might write a certain article in such a way that the way, you know, when people go to Google and they're looking for that article, they could never find it. So we're helping companies to kind of structure their content in a way where people can actually find what they're looking for. So you say that there are these signals. How much of that comes from the search engines themselves? Well, you know, the SEO field, because search engines are essentially a black box, and a lot of us are working with, you know, just third party data or working the best we can with the analytics that Google and the other search engines give us.

22:25A lot of this is guesswork. You know, we try to make informed guesses based on the data itself. But Google and the search engines do give us a lot of clues and a lot of insights about what we should be focusing on, especially when it comes to the technical thing. So, you know, giving us guidance about what we call like canonical tags or different metadata that we have to add to a website for them to really be able to parse and crawl through that website effectively. Those are direct signals that Google gives us that we work with. But a lot of it is kind of, you know, interpreting what we're seeing as far as what the data shows and then making informed guesses based on the history and on the analysis that we do for different clients.

23:02So based on how Google describes it, they're fairly communicative with web developers and sorry, web content creators. It doesn't actually sound like that is true. I would say when it comes to the technical side of things, Google's quite communicative. You know, it's really in their best interest to have web, you know, fast websites, websites that are accessible for users, websites that have a great user experience. And Google does a lot of developer conferences, a lot of communications on the technical side. And it's quite easy to, you know kind of get in touch with them if you have a specific technical question like for example john mueller hosts um webmaster hangouts on google often if not like several times per month where he answers a lot of people's questions so yes technically speaking i think they do provide a lot of guidance but what about content because it seems like content the actual things on the web page is the thing that actually matters here does google give any guidance they they certainly do give guidance.

23:59For example, they give a lot of questionnaires that site owners can follow when thinking about what Google considers helpful content. They also have something called the Search Quality Rater Guidelines, which is a document that you can find online. It's about maybe 160 plus pages. And that's specifically used to inform Google's human search quality evaluator team as to what good content or bad content kind of looks like. So that's something that the SEO community looks at a lot as well. But to your point, getting into granular questions about, is this content good or bad for Google? What does helpful content mean?

24:33That's become trickier in the last few years because they can't tell us everything because people spam everything that they can get their hands on. Right. So it almost feels like a kind of a battle. Yes, absolutely. But to this level, to this point, you say they give this advice and they're vague on the content, but direct on the technical. So how has Google search quality got so much worse then? there's so many different factors at play um you know i think the reason why seos have a bad reputation in general and to your question earlier you know is there such thing as white hat seo there's a huge spectrum of approaches and beliefs within the seo space um for whatever reason the people that spam google the most are the ones that have been kind of creating this like the kind of the reputation that we have as an industry lately um and i get that because they've been quite successful.

25:31You know, a lot of people that are spamming Google, especially with AI lately have, have really made it into top positions. So they're getting a lot of visibility with those tactics. But you know, there's a lot of us that are doing work that again, it's like kind of advised by search engines to do because it really does make the internet easier for everybody to use. So that's been a challenge lately. I think that for whatever reason, you know, maybe because Google's shifted internally so much of its focus to AI lately. Obviously, there's these big external challenges that Google's facing as a business lately.

26:03Maybe they're not, haven't been as focused on search quality for whatever reason. I don't actually have any type of evidence of that other than what I'm seeing, but I haven't seen as much spam and SEO manipulation as I've seen over the last year or so. That being said, they're really cracking down on it in the last few months. So sometimes it just takes them a while to catch up. Something you've said publicly recently is real businesses are being affected by the most recent Google updates. Can you kind of get into that? Like who are the people being affected here? Yeah, I mean, that's that's nothing new.

26:40I think, you know, Google Google creates these algorithm updates multiple times, big ones, at least multiple times per year, every year. And we've seen a lot of companies get get caught up in those algorithm updates before. In most cases, they're doing something that goes against Google's SEO or spam guidelines. The difference now is that there's a lot of these new types of algorithm updates that Google is launching that are affecting a lot of people in the publishing space. So both large and small publishers, especially smaller publishers over the last couple of years. And these are, for example, people that might have built a business doing travel blogging, doing recipe blogging, product reviews.

27:21And so if you do consider those people a business, and I think they would because they often have staff, they have people going to the places, writing the travel reviews, things like this. Google's dramatically reduced the visibility of how those sites appear on Google and the amount of traffic that they're getting. So when was the last major update to Google? Sometime in March, right? It's unclear when it actually started and finished. Yeah, the last major update, I would say, was the March core update, which took 45 days to complete. But that started in early March and then ended in April. But there's been a few different aspects of that update and new spam policies that they've introduced as well.

27:59So we're actually still kind of in the middle of some of that rollout happening. Yeah, it's strange, though. And this is not on you. This is on Google. You say there's technical things they say, there's quality things they say. But even recipe sites look terrible. They're full of ads. They make your phone so hot it burns you. Okay, maybe not that hot. But it feels like Google doesn't actually seem to be maintaining quality. And it seems like they almost fight those who do in SEO. How do you feel about your relationship with Google? It's hard to say right now. I think something that's been very tricky for me is that I've built a bit of a name for myself as the person that goes around.