Published October 3, 2023

No, I’m not feeling lucky, Googs.

A lot of things are going wrong. For example, if you use Reader View to read this story, it might tell you it’s from May 13, 2015, or it might tell you it’s from today. If you read a story of mine from earlier this year, Reader View might tell you it’s from two days ago.

I’m trying to take it all in stride, though. Things have been going wrong for a long time.

Take Google, for example. Have you had the feeling lately that Google just isn’t itself anymore? If so, you’re not alone. Testimony during Google’s antitrust case revealed that the company may be altering billions of queries a day to generate results that will get you to buy more stuff, Wired reported yesterday.

And how about that headline, huh? “How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet.”

And then there’s this:

This is not surprising to me. I have found Google to be useless more often than not lately. Some of my editor friends are more sophisticated search-engine users than I am. I’m thinking I really should have signed up for the class they attended. (There was an actual seminar recently.)

Check out the Wired story. It’s revealing.

And if you find things going wrong with search, imagine Google saying, “It’s not you, it’s me.”

Update: I’m editing this to add that even one of the alternative search engines my editor friends recommended to me is apparently being swallowed up by Google’s gravitational pull.

The money quote from the Oct. 16 report linked above: The tumult has forced Ecosia to rethink its business plan in order to compete with new chatbot-like search engines built on large language models. Today, the company began switching from providing results exclusively from Microsoft’s Bing, as it has for the past 14 years, to primarily sourcing them from Google—though it will still syndicate some Bing results via marketing company System 1.