Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)Wow some terrible reporting about Google's latest horrible ideas about how to distort information access in the name of "convenience" (or something):
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-it-is-over/
A short thread
🧵>>
5 years ago (2021) Google researchers Metzler et al put out a preprint talking about how LLMs would change information access ("Rethinking Search"). It was full of TERRIBLE ideas, and Chirag Shah and I wrote a reply ("Situating Search"):
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3498366.3505816
>>
We followed a couple of years later with further arguments about, inter alia, protecting the information ecosystem:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649468
While Nora Lindemann was writing about similar ideas:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-024-01944-w
>>
Envisioning Information Access Systems: What Makes for Good Tools and a Healthy Web? | ACM Transactions on the Web
We observe a recent trend toward applying large language models (LLMs) in search and positioning them as effective information access systems. While the interfaces may look appealing and the apparent breadth of applicability is exciting, we are concerned ...
But all the academic papers in the world showing why something is a bad idea won't stop companies from doing it, if it's profitable and/or fits into their quasi-religious beliefs that "AI" is the future, alas.
So let's look at what Google is up to now, or at least says they are, via TechCrunch as stenographer:
>>
Not satisfied to cut people off from the important sense-making of looking at information in its context and finding and navigating different perspectives (what "AI overviews" do), Google also wants to tell you what to search for:
>>
How infantilizing --- you thought you were looking to find something that someone else wrote on the web. But woah! Now you've been "dropped into" an "interactive experience". Yeah, Google can just fuck right off with that.
>>
Look, I hate pointy-clicky interfaces as much as the next Gen-Xer (let me use the keyboard, dammit) but it is so weird to reduce the important, and importantly effortful, work of navigating the information ecosystem to the apparent drudgery of clicking on links that are (*shudder*) blue!!!
>>
Here is where it really starts to show that this journalist is just lightly paraphrasing a press release. "Links will become an afterthought," will they? What is your evidence for that confident statement about the future?
>>
Spot the magical thinking here. No, the "AI" isn't making sense of anything. It's making papier-mache of the input, and preventing the use from doing the sense-making.
Also, is that the Pokemon sense of "evolution"?
>>
To expand just a little bit: the point of a Google Alert was to gain access to things that people were saying about a topic that you were tracking, which you otherwise might not turn up. And every (blue, even!) link that you clicked on brought you to a web page you could examine to get a sense of who was writing, in what context, and why.
>>
More stenography here. Google starting shoving the "AI Overviews" into query results as an opt-out situation. That is, you have to take action to have them not pop up. I don't doubt they are *shown to* 2.5 billion monthly users, but that doesn't mean they are used by as many or desired by them.
>>
Hamish Buchanan@emilymbender And the opt out function has never really functioned.
ShadSterling@hamishb @emilymbender there’s an opt-out function??
romli@romli @hamishb @emilymbender for the AI overview that precedes any actual search results, that link doesn’t describe a persistent opt-out, only a per-search bypass with “ -ai”. Which is a start
Tom Tom@ShadSterling @romli @hamishb @emilymbender use duckduckgo and you have simple ai opt out .
But anyway all this suppose there will be something left to search for on the web. Nowadays most often than not the first 10 links returned are AI generated web site slop.
Given that this slop is now used to generate further down the drain AI sites, the untrustworthy garbage'll soon supersede 100-1 trustworthy sources.
Maybe we'll have to come back to human indexed content of a curated list of sites.
Morqendi
@morqendi @tomtom @romli @hamishb @emilymbender the only time I use Google is when DDG results are useless so I prepend with “g! ” to try Google, and even the noai version doesn’t append “ -ai” so I still get the AI overview and an actual setting would still help.
I’ll try to remember to try prepending with “g! -ai “, but that’s not an acceptable way for them to interpret “opt out”
Saufian@ShadSterling @morqendi @tomtom @romli @hamishb @emilymbender
For these search cases, I use the DDG bang "sp!"
This way, it does the research on StartPage, which is some kind of anonymous and no-AI google page.
For these search cases, I use the DDG bang "sp!"
This way, it does the research on StartPage, which is some kind of anonymous and no-AI google page.
Michael Gale@ShadSterling @romli @hamishb @emilymbender
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/no-shit-sherlock/
Would love to know if this works for you!
