The biggest tech story of 2024 is the death of Google.
For a generation, when people wanted to find something, they’d say they were going to “google” it.
This era is ending.
Things like the Arc browser and sites like Perplexity are coming for Google’s search business. Consumers are using Reddit for search topics of interest and watching TikTok instead of YouTube. Microsoft is gaining on Google Chrome.
The response by Google, announced in May, was to blow itself up.
Google is no longer indexing the whole web. It’s laying off core employees and moving their work overseas, like a southern pajama maker from the 1950s.
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) game that people learned for 20 years is over. It doesn’t matter what your robots.txt file says. You may not even want Google to crawl your pages. They’re not helping people find you. They’re just stealing your stuff.
Link rot is becoming universal. Anyone who has used a “shortener” in links is going to find them broken as of next year.
Google has told us why they’re doing all this. They’re feeding their AI ambitions. They’re buying racks of Nvidia servers and pushing their Gemini AI engine on users as a Google replacement. Google calls this an “improvement” but what it really means is that if you use Google to find something, the only place you’ll be able to link to it from is Google itself.
Gemini is Garbage
Gemini is not a Google replacement. It’s the wise ass who mouths off from a few top search results. An increasing portion of the Web is not accessed, or is inaccessible, meaning the quality of Gemini inputs is going down.
But it’s more than that. The brute force approach used by ChatGPT, Gemini, and Co-Pilot is just wrong. The most obvious problem is it doesn’t deal with outliers, that is, the unexpected.
This should not be news. Back when I was in high school, the Firesign Theater put out a recording called “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus.” A bright, beautiful future was destroyed by a hacker asking the computer a question it couldn’t answer, because the premise was nonsense. (Found you a copy.)
This is precisely what is happening now to brute force AI systems.
While making something that doesn’t work, the Cloud Czars are breaking everything else. I can’t link to news stories from Microsoft anymore. (I must move the address to Chrome first.) None of Amazon’s deep links from Google work anymore. They all go to Amazon’s home page.
This means no store or media company can rely on search to find new customers. Media is leaving the Web for newsletters and podcasts and videos, even TikTok, trying to get people inside their doors. The result is that people can cocoon even more thoroughly inside their preferred media bubbles.
In trying to compete on a failed AI premise, in other words, Google has made itself evil. It doesn’t know why the porridge bird lays its eggs in the air. It can’t find you a job.
