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|                                                                      |
|  TITLE: I'm So Sick of Google                                        |
|                                                                      |
|  DATE: May 26, 2025                                                  |
|                                                                      |
|  AUTHOR: grump@seogrump.com                                          |
|                                                                      |
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It's been interesting to watch how Google has changed over the past
couple of decades. Remember when their unofficial corporate mantra was 
supposedly "Don't be evil?" Well, it's been quite obvious for some time
that those days are gone. 

There were already accusations suggesting that Google was intentionally 
making search results worse to make people click "Back" and view more 
ads. Now that we're in the AI age, though, I feel like the experience 
of using the Google search engine is objectively bad a large part of 
the time.

I can always switch to a different search engine, of course, but it's
kind of difficult in my line of work because my clients aren't exactly
trying to rank on Kagi. I need to be where their potential customers
are.

One thing I've noticed over the past couple of weeks, though, is that
the AI overviews on Google are getting absolutely unbearable. It feels
like Google is trying to provide an AI summary for almost every query,
even when the AI has nothing useful to say about your search. The
overview fills almost a page of screen real estate with information
that you often didn't request and provides no value whatsoever.

Case in point: the "site:" operator. When you use that operator,
you're specifically saying, "just show me results from this site."
Even then, the "helpful" AI pops in with a message like "The search
'(search term) site:(website)' indicates a desire to find information
about (search term) on (website)..." 

I got the absolute worst AI overview for a search with the "site:"
operator just a few days ago. Google actually said something along the 
lines of, "(Website) isn't an authoritative source of information about
(Topic). Here's a summary of information found on other sites."

I totally get that sometimes the AI overviews are useful. Overall,
though, I feel like the experience of using Google hasn't been this bad
since the days when eHow ranked for every query.

It's also quite obvious that Google has no concern about the long-term
health of the web and is simply trying to maximize their financial
returns while they can. Stealing and repurposing content without
compensating the creators can only have one long-term outcome. People
will eventually stop creating. There will at some point be little left
on the web other than AI content, e-commerce sites, brand sites and
social media. After that, AI models will mostly get trained on their
own content. Once it gets to that point -- who knows? Google certainly 
doesn't have a plan. None of the AI companies do. 

It would be very nice if more people would try other search engines
and force Google to do better.

I was very tickled to find one of my recent posts [1] mentioned on a
gopherhole that I enjoy reading [2]. Gopher seems to be a very small
place indeed. It hadn't occurred to me that those who operate their
own gopher servers would certainly know if they were being crawled
by AI scrapers. It's good to know that this particular corner of the
Internet probably hasn't been invaded yet.


[1] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/seogrump/phlog/20250514-llms-and-gopher.txt

[2] gopher://gopher.unixlore.net:70/0/glog/gopher-and-ai-bots.md


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