Google Hates You

i guess i don't blame a writer who's job is threatened by this technology to write a piece like this. but the perspective is ultimately one where they are complaining about how it affects them, without regard to the end user.

it's the same as toll booth operators complaining about fastpass

hilariously• 2 months ago

As a user I hate google's approach as well, not because of job related reasons, but the functionality keeps changing to no increased value to me. I don't see how you the end user would have a different opinion unless you did not use google before say 2016.

cosmic_cheese• 2 months ago

Yes, the churn they bring to products that were complete over a decade ago is ridiculous. So much change for change’s sake (or more likely in pursuit of promotions internally) and so little thought to quality, what makes a product good, and what would make users happy.

shaftway• 2 months ago

As a user I actually appreciate it. But most of the stuff I google is coding questions.

Before if I asked a question, the top 3 results would be StackOverflow. I'd click into the first one and find out that the question was subtly different than mine making its answer useless, but it included a lot of similar words. Go back and click into the second one. It's exactly my problem, asked three years ago, no answer. Go back and click into the third one. Same question, but it's been answered. Great. But the accepted answer has a score of -3 and another answer has a score of 5. So which one do I follow? Whoops, it's actually neither of them, because the library has broken both of those workflows.

Now I get my answer right away 90% of the time. And if I don't then I scroll down and I'm not worse off than I was 2 years ago.

striking• 2 months ago

They try to offer some other perspectives as well:

This isn’t just a me problem. You don’t have to be a writer to have your livelihood be dependent upon Google search results. Small-business owners need Google to reach potential new customers. Students, many of them working on school-issued Chromebooks made by Google, need it to research term papers and study for final exams. In its earliest form, Google dot-com was the perfect utility for all of these people and millions more.

But I agree with you (despite being predisposed to agreeing with the author) that the invective doesn't quite land because they don't do quite enough work to ensure we're on their side in understanding how we might be affected.

I'll just take this space to note that folks that feel similarly to the author should try Kagi, as they let you choose how much AI you want rather than forcing a chat interface onto you or directing you away from links.

dmoose• 2 months ago

i guess i don't blame a writer who's job is threatened by this technology to write a piece like this
it's the same as toll booth operators complaining about fastpass

I think your analogy would work better if toll booth operators built the roads, the cars, the toll booths themselves, and then were all replaced by fastpass.

convolvatron• 2 months ago

sure, there is some bitching about how the ad funded web-site-news business model is getting distrupted. I'm not completely heartbroken about that.

but much of the article describes how Google is trying to deploy their final solution for intermediation. their attempts to 'googlify' things like grocery shopping and job searching pretty much failed. but now, they are promoting a model where, finally, all information they present has been googlified. they are not a phone book or card catalog, but now the entire library. there aren't original sources any more, just what Google has decided to tell you about something.

ceheaaf3• 2 months ago

It's more like a company unaffiliated with the toll booth offering a better deal that lets you avoid the toll booth, pocketing all the money, and the road becoming unusable from lack of maintenance.

themadturk2• 2 months ago

But the writer is an end user. How does his perspective not regard the end user?

jdw642• 2 months ago

Also, I'm pretty sure Microsoft and Meta hate me as well. Honestly, if every major tech company dislikes me at this point, I'm starting to suspect it's a 'me' problem.

greenavocado• 2 months ago

They hate people they can't control

guessmyname• 2 months ago

I always find titles like “Google Hates You” a bit weird. People usually argue that employees are not personally responsible for bad company decisions, that criticism should be aimed at the corporation itself, not at random engineers or designers working there. But then we turn around and assign human emotions to the corporation anyway.

A company cannot literally “hate” anyone. It has no feelings, intentions, or consciousness. So who exactly is supposed to hate you here? The CEO? The executives? The leadership team? Every single employee at Google? And who is “you,” exactly? Billions of users spread across the planet?

I get the point the title is trying to make, but it feels more accurate to say that Google optimizes for incentives that are often misaligned with users, not that it emotionally despises them.

jdw642• 2 months ago

First, what you are arguing is that a corporation itself has no feelings, is merely an algorithm, and that projecting human emotions onto a company is meaningless.

However, based on my general observation, a company's primary purpose is often the self-actualization of its owner. People usually cite monetization as a corporate goal, but since owners rarely hate money, the two usually go hand in hand. In reality, though, an owner's self-actualization takes precedence even in the face of clear financial losses. From that perspective, the employees hired by the company also bear a certain degree of responsibility.

Of course, I don't think that is inherently bad. You can't just divide everything into a moral dichotomy of good and evil; it's a deeply intertwined issue of desire, greed, and self-actualization (such as doing the exact research one aims for through massive corporate R&D investments).

Your point is valid, but it relies on extreme reductionism. For example, I might think a particular nation's system is flawed. A country has its merits, yet we still "hate" specific countries. But when you think about it, a nation is just a system too, isn't it?

Ultimately, we just speak selectively based on these cognitive frameworks. You could argue that Google's employees are entirely blameless, or you could argue they are serving an evil system. It’s merely a difference in perspective.

What is absolutely certain, however, is that Google's current form of business has completely upended the existing economic structure. Whether this is a net positive or negative remains to be seen. In the future, Google might pivot its business model to pay high-quality creators directly, but the real issue is that this new system leaves everyone highly susceptible to being subjugated by Google.

Realistically, we cannot predict everything in such a complex future, nor can we say this is definitively bad. Google users have a desire to find answers more easily, while content creators have a desire to make a living off their work. Striking that compromise is exactly what makes this so difficult.

PaulDavisThe1st• 2 months ago

it feels more accurate to say that Google optimizes for incentives that are often misaligned with users, not that it emotionally despises them.

Oh, no doubt. But it's a lot, lot less fun, eh?

Still, I'll push back on the vague sense of jargon-esque doublespeak: Google's management frequently make decisions that do work against the best interests and the desires of its users.

0x69420• 2 months ago

the consequentialist "may as well" or "for all intents and purposes" is implicit. of course you can't ascribe literal teleology to something like a megacorp; diffusion of accountability is a defining trait of any sufficiently large organisation. but, "misaligned incentives" and hatred look the same from the sole of the boot. in both cases, you probably want to get your head off the curb before it comes down.

acheron• 2 months ago

Breaking news from 2005

mentalgear2• 2 months ago

when the officially retired don't be evil ?

charcircuit2• 2 months ago

As a reminder the mission of Google is:

Google’s mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Its mission is not to give traffic to websites. If websites are a bad way for users to get information due to endless rambling or obnoxious ads then don't be surprised if that information is made more accessible. It's like if Google Maps didn't have things like business hours hosted within Maps instead of requiring the user to do extra work and find it on the business's website.

kstrauser2• 2 months ago

They didn’t fix that when they were removing “don’t be evil”? Interesting oversight.

charcircuit2• 2 months ago

They didn't remove don't be evil.

dwedge• 2 months ago

While I sympathise and it's a well written article, writers engaging in SEO and clickbait (as they admitted) to drive traffic are just as responsible for the death of the internet. They're bemoaning the loss of traffic but that traffic may have already been stolen from a more appropriate search result that didn't have a team working on SEO.

Also, the irony isn't lost on me that I had a cookie dialogue fill 80% of the screen and this little snippet:

Early Google didn’t even have ads; it was so clean and pure.
Advertisement Article continues below this ad

They don't just want your eyeballs they want your data. They want to track you and give that data to advertisers.

Like I said I do sympathise and maybe it's a necessary evil, but in my opinion all of these sites are just a less successful side of the same coin.

winstonp• 2 months ago

Google Search has been awful for the last couple of years. Good riddance to SEO.

mentalgear2• 2 months ago

you wish ... it's just another kind of hidden PR called LLM poisoning and all the previous SEO grifters offer that now instead.

ironic_otter• 2 months ago

Visiting websites as a human is sooo 2025. We are entering a world where only bots actually fetch primary web content any more. Our gatekeeper overlords will filter, curate, and remix everything for us. This is the next step in the machines taking over.

topherPedersen• 2 months ago

Don't be evil. Drop the don't; it's cleaner.

commandlinefan• 2 months ago

They just inserted an exclamation mark after the first word.

DamnInteresting• 2 months ago

No, money down![1]

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/TheSimpsons/comments/102sh8/one_of_...

abirch• 2 months ago

It's important for everyone to have their own brand. Matt Levine won't be as impacted by this as this writer. You've got to focus on making it easy to find your content and having it delivered to my email is about as convenient as it gets.

abbadadda• 2 months ago

It is probably worth noting Drew very much does have his own brand as a co-founder of Defector.com. While not as popular as Levine’s money stuff, Defector.com survives on user subscriptions alone and a lot of URL requests are direct. Drew freelances for SFGate, and with that said I think he’s writing from the perspective of his “freelancer hat” and lamenting the impact “Google Zero” will have on websites around the world dependent on Google’s traffic.

hyperhello• 2 months ago

Maybe the computer world has been a distributed nightmare of mortgage-driven development for decades now for everyone. Maybe now that the people who were on the inside are not getting that sweet and foolish feeling of being on the inside while everyone else is on the outside, they start to see it's really a monstrous pseudo-intellectual stupidity closer to pop entertainment than science.

b65e8bee43c2ed0• 2 months ago

Many people don’t; they’ll get a top-line answer from AI and deem it not worth the trouble to click or scroll any further.

sparing the user the usual experience of visiting some random ad-riddled clickbait mill and trying to extract useful information from ten paragraphs of SEO diarrhea.

Sites like SFGATE need traffic to survive, and writers like me need those sites to stay alive if we hope to remain gainfully employed by them.

~~learn to code~~ (oops, too late, lol).

mimikatz• 2 months ago

You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower.

ceheaaf3• 2 months ago

Nah. When an intelligent human makes a decision (say, someone who can get themselves hired at google), they're aware of the systemic effects of their behaviour.

Google is not a lawnmower. Google is people. And they hate you.

johnea• 2 months ago

I find it pretty funny, that in an article decrying goggle's abusive behavior, the screenshot they link (which obviously needs to be a video) is a link to a goggle owned property:

Look at this horrible s—t. Look at it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6EBMG8OEBI

No, I'm not going to look at it, and neither should you...

hackboyfly2• 2 months ago

Can someone solve this equation for me.

I give google content and they pay me in traffic.

Why would I give Google my content if they stop paying me for it?

ceheaaf3• 2 months ago

If they can just take it, why would they pay you for it?

themadturk2• 2 months ago

They've already taken it; what are you going to do about it?

hackboyfly2• 2 months ago

Not index on google? Prevent bot crawling?

Google Hates You

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