Enshittification of Google

“Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.”

This 25 years old sentence was written by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page - the founders of Google.

https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-research2023-media/pubtools/pdf/334.pdf

Tom Faber, a journalist with the Financial Times found about himself in July 2024:

I didn’t know I was dead until I saw it on Google. When I searched my name, there it was: a picture of my smiling face next to the text “Tom Faber was a physicist and publisher, and he was a university lecturer at Cambridge for 35 years”. Apparently I died on 27 July 2004, aged 77. This was news to me. Google provides a feedback form to resolve this type of bug. I filled it in several times, but it made no difference.

Self Discovery Via Google

The other day, I searched for myself.

The topline seems reasonable. It identified me as an “economist”!

The fun begins in the next line where the search begins to combine pictures with texts. Here is what I get.

As far as I can tell, the picture of that young gentleman on the left is not me. I do not have another brother from a different mother who looks like that either. His badge says “delegate” and something else that I cannot decipher.

In the background, there are two flags: One is clearly of Mauritius. The other could be Ethiopia - or some other African country. I have never lived there.

Google itself is unable to find the source of that picture. Imagine that.

Executive strong suspicion: That young man does not exist. He is completely AI fiction.

There is also that unsaid reason why I believe it is not me - to quote from the classic movie:

To understand the mechanics, we have to examine how Google is incorporating *new* information these days. Recently, it is scraping data from Substack.com and passing it off as news! The proof is in the pudding. Again taking myself as an example:

So, the top three “news” about me are two substack posts I had recently that deals with history six decades ago and a century ago and a snippet from a paper I wrote in 2004. Hard to call any of that is *news* in 2024.

Just to have another reality check, I put the name of a good friend of mine. He happens to be one of the finest researchers I have met in my entire life. [And I have met lots of researchers.] 

Here is how his page looked.

These are all genuine results with no obvious errors. I can vouch for the authenticity of all the photos - they are all indeed him.

So, I am not suggesting that Google is often wrong. Not so.

Where is Google today?

Google Search has changed the vocabulary of searching - figuratively and literally.

I mean literally. “Googling” is a verb now.

The Oxford English Dictionary included Google as a transitive verb on June 15, 2006 and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary followed suit in July 2006.

Google (the company) was very happy with that. They were very unhappy with the phrase: “Ungooglable”. Objections from Google have forced the removal of the word "ungoogleable" from a list of new Swedish words, the Language Council of Sweden says. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-21944834]

How important *is* Google?

A recent paper shows how important Google Searches are in the life of the users. With a reasonably large (over 40,000) global sample, they find the users valuing Google Search higher than meeting friends - on the average. [See Figure 1 below]

Why is Google Search trading sharpness for bluntness?

The answer lies in its revenue model. Most searches are vague. And vague searches means people linger on the search engine longer (in the jargon, less “bounce”). That means more eyeballs for the ad it shows on the sidebars. More ads, more revenue. 

Google’s main source of revenue is from the ads. Six years ago, it was 86 percent of the total. Now it is 79 percent of the total. But the total value has grown by a factor of three - in just six short years. 

Executive conclusion: Google, for its survival, has to protect the ad revenue. 

Executive result: We cannot expect Google to move away from its current strategy of incorporating vagueness to maximize revenue.

This brings me back to the quote: “Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.” from Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page - the founders of Google.

Ironic.

When Google went commercial, the founders toyed with two revenue models: Subscription based or advertising based. Eventually it settled on an advertising based model. However, it only displays ads for just 20 percent of the searches. The other 80 percent have no ad at all. Twenty percent of ads generate eighty percent of Google’s revenue.

[Executive side observation: 80-20 rule - rules. It is really a manifestation of the Pareto Principle.]

Executive fact staring us: Ads fund Google.

Google also dominates the browser market with Chrome. Currently, Chrome is being threatened by various governments. They want to break its monopoly. 

In the past breaking monopolies did not produce a clear spark of competition (breaking up oil monopoly, telephone monopoly among others).

Executive Hard Truth: For the “free” service, Google has been very useful. But, its latest tango with AI has been less than stellar. 

Executive question: Will it correct itself?

Executive answer: I would like to reiterate what Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai purportedly declared in 1971 about the significance of the French Revolution of 1789: “Too soon to tell.” To be fair, he might have thought the question was about the 1968 student unrest in France. But the phrase has become the meme of all memes.

Enshittification of Everything

Cory Doctorow, created the term “enshittification” (Word of the Year 2023), had this to say about Google: “Companies become too big to fail, then too big to jail, then too big to care. Google is too big to care.”

Does that mean that the end of Google is near? No.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_of_the_end_of_Google

Enshittification is not particularly applicable to Google alone. Whenever the self interest of the user and the company that provides the service are not aligned, the same problem arises. For example, dating app sites do not *want* you to find your life partner and stop using their app. So, their matching algorithm is not in *your* best interest - but to have it in such a way that you come back to them again and again. Drug companies are more interested in having you using their drugs for your survival than to cure you of that disease.