This time, no fooling around, no heavy petting, cause I’m going straight for third base. . .

I dumped Google Search over a year ago for Kagi.com, and honestly, I don’t miss the torture even slightly. Google Search was already pathetic back then, and shockingly it has gotten even more useless, thanks to -wait for it – the AI (because of course it has):

We all know that Google’s ethics are about as solid as jello. I mean, they lost three federal antitrust lawsuits in 18 months, and that’s an Olympic record of sleaze. But ethics aside, the main reason I ditched Google is simpler, cause their search flat-out sucked.

Back in spring 2024, it became painfully clear to me that Google had surrendered to spam.

Every search was buried in garbage from SEO scammers whose mastery of keyword-stuffing websites and link-bait was unmatched. Product searches, forget it. My screen filled instantly with nonsense affiliate links, scammy trash, and shady websites that delivered overpriced shit, drop-shipped directly from Temu with a huge markup.

Look, good info is still out there.

You know, with a bit of effort, you can find people who spend real time testing stuff, comparing products carefully, and actually producing meaningful reviews. But do those good reviews pop up in Google searches?

Of course they don’t. Not anymore these days.

Take Housefresh.com for example.

They’re legit experts who review air purifiers in depth. Good thing, since air quality is a big deal if you have allergies or immune issues. But Housefresh’s legit experts clearly suck at gaming Google’s shitty algorithm, and instead, winners on Google are garbage pages filled with fake reviews and affiliate trash hosted by formerly respectable websites like Forbes and Better Homes & Gardens.

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Search intermezzo

I searched for air purifiers. First thing you see are the products that take up three quarters of the page’s real estate.

And just under-the-fold you get some sponsored Youtube links, followed by more sponsored links plus another round of stuff you can buy through their affiliate network. . .

And even on the second page, the first thing they show you are . . . you got it ! Sponsored links.

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Google CEO: Commercial pitches are information too!

Google loves to pretend that they care, and they are labeling these scam sites as “site reputation abuse” and every year they are vowing to stop it. Then they immediately do fuck-all about it. Meanwhile, they’ve happily laid off 10,000 actual employees while blowing billions on shady stock buybacks:

Take them peeps from Housefresh again, they decided to use their smarts not to scam Google, but to expose exactly how broken Google’s system is. Their latest report goes straight for Google’s shiny “AI Overviews” – the magical cure Google promised for their broken search results.

Read it and weep: https://housefresh.com/beware-of-the-google-ai-salesman/

These “AI Overviews” are supposed to neatly summarize the internet’s best answers, and bypass all the spammy websites. It has Black text, white background, bold highlights (not in my case though cause my system is set to dark).

How wonderfully trustworthy.

If you believe Google’s PR, they’re now the good guys saving readers from the evil publishers and their intrusive ads.

Cute story, Google, except your AI summaries are worthless junk too.

The Housefresh team showed how Google’s AI summaries are comically bad at selecting accurate info. Google’s Gemini chatbot actually prefers garbage-tier sources and happily omits negative facts – even when those facts come straight from its own favorite trash sites.

They even caught Gemini using a template to lie to your face. Ask Gemini if some air purifier is worth buying, even one Wirecutter calls “the worst air purifier ever tested,” and it spits out the same useless filler nonsense:

“The [model] purifier is [worthwhile/good value/a worthwhile purchase]. It’s [praised] for [cleaning air/removing particles]. Whether the [product] is worth it depends on individual needs.”

The AI’s not picky either: it gives the same schpiel even if you make up fake air purifiers like “Levoit Core 5510” or “Coy Mega 700”.

Worse, if you ask Google’s AI “what are the cons” of a specific model, it simply ignores negative info. Push harder, and it might invent fake drawbacks, and when you need info about a model without UV lights, no worries, cause Gemini warns about imaginary UV dangers anyway.

Google swears that these AI summaries won’t hurt traffic to the original sites, since they include links to the “sources”. Yeah right, and my mom is the Duchess of Canterburry. Because – as you may have experienced yourself, everyone diligently follows each footnote like it’s a PhD dissertation.

Sure thing, Schlomo.

A guy at Housefresh crunched numbers on these sources.

Here’s the breakdown of Google’s fancy AI summaries. . . It is mostly garbage:

• 43.1% of what it tells you comes straight from product manufacturers who are trying to sell you their stuff. So, it’s not a review, it’s a sales pitch.
• 19.5% comes from pages that have nothing to do with what you asked. Like asking for air purifier reviews and getting a recipe for banana bread.

What are we left with – the 37.4 percent, I mean?

Yeah, well, mostly spam sites full of fake reviews and affiliate links, you know, exactly the crap Google said it would stop promoting. And worse, some of the answers are AI copying other AI, regurgitating bad info in a never-ending loop of robot slop-eat-slop, until it has become an inhumane centipede of überslop.

Now, there’s a tiny fraction left and that mostly comes from Reddit, and on Reddit are real people sharing real experiences. And Reddit is reliable enough that typing “reddit” into Google still helps your search, but the problem is that SEO scammers already invaded Reddit, where they are bribing mods to let spam thrive.

In short, Google’s AI summaries are a mix of irrelevant garbage, paid ads disguised as info, and outright fake nonsense.

And Google CEO Sundar Pitch-AI just shrugs, saying commercial pitches are information too. Classy shit there Sundar.

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Google’s AI teams get paid for clicks, not for user satisfaction

You might wonder why Pitch-AI intentionally makes his own search product suck so bad.

My simple answer to this rather difficult question is: it’s not about users, it’s about investors.

Google’s stock has a price-to-earnings ratio of 20:1, and that means investors think Google’s still growing. Companies with high PE ratios can throw stock around like monopoly money to buy competitors or hire talent. If growth slows, the PE ratio tanks, investors flee, and Google collapses.

Google already owns 90% of search.

They can’t grow that of course. So now they pretend that AI is going to be their new growth story. Investors lap it up, even though AI actually costs Google billions and produces exactly diddly-squat in revenue.

This growth fantasy is why every accidental touch on your screen opens some stupid chatbot. Google literally pays bonuses to their UX teams based on how many accidental AI clicks users make.

Let me mansplain this . . .

Google is so desperate to prove to investors that their AI-search is so popular and growing that it counts every accidental click on its AI features as “user engagement”. Yes, even the times when your fat finger slips and accidentally triggers some annoying chatbot pop-up you never wanted.

And it gets dumber even, because apparently Google actually pays the teams who create the interaction design, bonuses based on how often users “interact” with the AI. So the more accidental clicks you make, the better the numbers look internally. Doesn’t matter if you closed the chatbot in rage after two seconds, cause your twitchy finger just earned someone a performance bonus.

It’s all part of the “growth story” illusion.

Google needs investors to believe AI is the future, so it pads the stats by weaponizing your clumsy thumbs.

Accidental tap.

Boom.

Cha-ching.

Growth achieved.

By the way, Google and other tech companies have systematically relocated the buttons you actually need – like settings, search, menu, back – to inconvenient corners of your screen? Meanwhile, they have planted AI chatbot triggers* right where your muscle memory expects useful functions to live.

This isn’t accidental. It us also deliberate user experience sabotage. Those accidental taps generate “engagement” data that AI teams use to justify their existence. Every frustrated user who accidentally summons a chatbot becomes a statistic proving “AI adoption is skyrocketing!”

Product managers get bonuses based on interaction numbers, not user satisfaction. So they optimize for accidental engagement rather than intentional use. Your clumsiness becomes their quarterly bonus.

Anyways. . .

The AI fanboys love to talk about creating superintelligence to save humanity, but that’s just Silicon Valley horseshit. AI is about investors and endless growth fantasies. They have pumped trillions in the promise of untold riches and they absolutely do not shy away from a little scheming to pump up the rations. This is the same dumb logic that pumped crypto and the metaverse – not because it made sense – but because investors need a new hype-story to believe in.

Bottom line: Google Search is now absolute garbage. It misleads billions of users to keep a dying growth narrative alive. Google search is dead, and it’s probably staying dead.

Move to Kagi – cause Google’s AI search (or any other) will only be about making money.

Signing off,

Marco

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I build AI by day and warn about it by night. I call it job security. Big Tech keeps inflating its promises, and I bring the pins. I call that balance and for me it is also simply therapy.

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