Better Offline - AI Is Breaking Google

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

On May 14th 2024, Google introduced their Search Generative Experience, a service that uses hallucination-prone artificial intelligence to generate answers to queries rather than just presenting links, all so that they could Wall Street that they're innovative and future-forward. The result is an even-more-broken search experience, and in this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through the rotten state of Google, and speaks with Lily Ray, a 15-year veteran of the search engine optimization industry, about how Google abandoned the web. LINKS: Lily Ray: https://lilyray.nyc/ https://twitter.com/lilyraynyc The Verge's Interview With Sundar Pichai: https://www.theverge.com/24158374/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-ai-search-gemini-future-of-the-internet-web-openai-decoder-interview See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting. Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than adds supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-I-Hart.

Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you. you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an Acapella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform?

We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The story I told myself can then shape my behavior, and that can lead me to sabotage

the possibility of connection. This mental health awareness month, tune into the podcast deeply well with Debbie Brown if you've been searching for a soft place to land while doing the work to become whole. This podcast is for you to hear more. Listen to deeply well with Debbie Brown from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host Ed Zittron. Hey, you ever wonder who ruined Google? Well, the answer is Prabagar Ragavan, Google's former head of ads,

who led a coup to run Google Search, which led to websites decay. Now, I'm not just recounting my own work here. My source is Google Search. No, really, really. Search who ruined Google on Google Search, and it will pop up with an AI-generated summary of multiple articles that cite a piece I wrote called The Man Who Killed Google Search. Why?

Because on May 14th, 2020, Google decided in their incredible wisdom to add generative artificial intelligence to search results. These new AI generate results, dubbed Google's search generative experience, replace the initial links you'll see on some pages with an AI overview, one generated by scraping the text of other websites so that Google can answer your questions without you having to visit them, and consequently give them any ad revenue. It's very strange, but also, you may be thinking, Isn't generative AI the thing that regularly gets things wrong and is kind of unreliable and everyone knows about that?

Google wouldn't do that, right? Wrong! McKinsey alumnus and Google CEO Sundar Peshai told the Verges Nile Patel that he believes these results will actually help the web. I'd argue otherwise, these generative results will only help centralize the web's information around these big publishers that Google likes. All while creating less of a need for anybody to visit the rest of the internet, as in any of the other links, even if they're presented along an AI-generated summary. As Lauren Good of Wyatt said in the recent piece about Google's new shift to AI, by choosing when and where these overviews appear,

Google is essentially deciding what is or is not a complex question, and then they're making a judgment on what kind of web content should inform its summaries, as well as what content you're actually going to see or learn from. Yet these articles are also predicated on one very, very, very silly assumption, and I really respect Lauren and Nile, but seriously, you're making one major mistake. You're assuming that Google actually cares about building and maintaining a good search engine. Though it's been fixed since I wrote this script, you used to, as in a few days ago, be able to ask Google if there was a country in Africa that began with the letter K, and it would have resulted in the generative result that says, as of September 2021, no African country begins with the letter K.

However, Kenya is the closest African country to starting with a K sound, with two citations, a forum post from 2021 that quoted a hallucination from chat GPT, and a website titled Countries that Start with the Letter K, with the very first sentence beginning with Kenya. Google's generative search results have also recently said that one could use Elmer's glue to keep cheese from sliding off of a pizza, or that a dog played in the NBA, or that something called a squat plug is a device that helps keep the glutes tight squatting, rather than a joke scraped from a Reddit post about a very, very specific

kind of sex toy. Do not look it up. You do not need to know. These results, by the way, have already been taken care of because of the massive shitstorm that Google is dealing with from the very obvious mistake they've made and will continue to make. It's very upsetting. And these results are a result of a modified version of Google's Gemini Generative AI, their equivalent of chat GPT, generating answers based on the content of web pages, and these web pages can include everything. I'm talking news outlets, random blogs, posts from Reddit, and it's just this vile new strategy where, and I'm quoting the new head of search Liz Reid, you're allowing Google to do the Googling for you. Now, this is, of course, a really horrible idea for many, many reasons.

As I've mentioned repeatedly in the past, generative AI has this tendency to hallucinate. where it authoritatively states something that just is not true, mostly because these models don't actually know anything. Generative AI, like Gemini or ChatGPT, or Anthropics Claude, or Metas Lama, they're all responding to your queries by predicting what the most likely to be correct answer is based on parameters that they learned in their training data, which means that Google's AI-powered search is Googling for you with absolutely no comprehension or intellectual understanding

or really any read of the content itself. As a result, all it's able to do is say, okay, all right, these phrases seem to make up what the right answer could be based on mathematics, and these links seem to include these phrases, so I guess that's fine, which is why Google briefly recommended that you eat one rock a day because it was generating an answer

from the satirical newspaper, The Onion. Google's response was to tell the Virges Kylie Robeson that these were generally very uncommon queries that are not representative of most people's experience, specifically responding to Robeson's own query where Google told her that the mammal with the most bones was a Python. Just to be clear, a python is a reptile. They do have bones, though, fun fact. Now, as funny as these results might be, Google's AI-powered search is really horrible for the internet at large. By summarizing other people's links to generate an answer, Google's effectively stolen the internet, picking and choosing what parts it deems worthy of showing you,

and then providing this kind of hackneyed, hallucination-prone summary of what they think the links mean. Google's already positioned itself as a gatekeeper of the internet, by the way. They're meant to be the steward of what's important, and important is the word that they used in the original paper to describe page rank, which is how they rank pages. And the theoretical value exchange was that we get reliable, safe results that actually answered our queries. But AI-powered searches, they kind of turn Google into a source of truth and not a remotely reliable one. And they're using a technology that is well known for getting things wrong.

Now, you may think, well, surely Google would be both aware of this. And even if they, even if they're aware of it, they wouldn't put this hallucination-prone tech in deliberately, right? Surely this must be some kind of mistake. And you are wrong. Because Sundar Pashai told Nilae Patel in an interview that happened early last week that they're well aware of the problem of hallucinations and that they were still unsolved and that they were an inherent feature of large language models. Sundar, you're completely correct.

At which point, the CEO of Google said that large language models were good because of this and that in fact it made them very creative. Sondar, what the hell are you talking about, man? I don't need Google to be creative. need Google to answer my bloody question. When you say someone's being creative with the truth, you're describing someone lying. Oh my God, I feel like I'm... Anyway, anyway, it's extremely obvious how dangerous this strategy is. Generative AI could hallucinate, I don't know, how to deal with a chemical fire or a mental health issue or authoritatively misinformed somebody

that, say, I don't know, Barack Obama was a Muslim, which is an actual generative result that Google has since removed. Billions of people, regular, non-technical people, people that don't live on social media in the swill and constantly see the new news. They rely on Google every day to answer questions, and they're going to assume that a multi-trillion dollar tech company would not turn the most well-traffic source of information

in the bloody world over to an AI. And Peter Kafka over at Business Insider actually put this really well. He said it's like the difference between, being handed a map and being given directions that will send your car barreling over a cliff. I won't mince words. Google's AI-powered search is a goddamn travesty, both for the internet and for society at large. By choosing what queries to summarize and what sites to pull from,

Google both centralizes and polarizes the world's information, all while depriving actual publishers of traffic, the actual human beings creating the things that inform their search engine. And it's horrible. That alone is such a horrible problem. Now, of course, Sundar Peshai told Nilay Patel, who just went, yeah, sure, mate. Okay. No pushback, man. He told them, no, this is actually good for the web, because people will get the answers and then they'll click through. Yeah, let me give you an example of how wrong you are, Sundar. Look at social media. Look at when people see clickbait. Do you think people go, I should check the link? This could be used to

get engagement for my tweet. No, they tweet the thing and get mad about it. I've done this within the last 24 hours. I'm an idiot. But still, people are not going to be curious. They're going to assume that Google Search is not full of nonsense, that Google Search is not spitting out AI-generated summaries using hallucination-prone AI. I feel like I'm going crazy.

Anyway, while AI results cite their sources, it's just foolish to believe that regular people are going to click through to the results when Google itself has already answered the question, especially on service-driven queries that aren't served, say, whether a food is safe, or some sort of factual question. Publishers, especially news outlets, already heavily dependent on Google Search traffic, they're terrified that these summaries will further reduce traffic at a time when social networks, like Facebook, for example,

are no longer really sending them readers. And let's be honest, Google Search has already deteriorated drastically over the last few years, and its results are plagued with AI-generated spam and search engine-optimized nonsense, and these results overwhelm good, unique, authoritative content. To the point that major newspapers have put out public service announcements, like the Wall Street Journal, by the way, about how to avoid scams in the very first results you see on Google.

Now, you'd think the... this deluge of bad press would make Google say, huh, we should fix Google search. We should make things better. No, no, no, no, no, that's not what we do here at Google. No, Google plugged in an already unreliable artificial intelligence into a product that it's deliberately allowed to decay so that customers can get quasi-write answers from search results that Google itself barely maintains the quality of. It's, I sound a bit frustrated because this is so strange, this is all so strange.

This multi-trillion dollar company with this search engine that makes them tens of billions of dollars, they're just like, you know, just put the AI on it. They'll love it. And it sent their stock up, so I guess it doesn't bloody matter. But back to the regular results, just for a moment. Google claims that in its recent core update that they've helped reduce low quality and unhelpful content by 45%. And they're wrong, by the way. Search is still dominated by search engine optimized content, full of these links that are built to drive kickbacks to publishers called affiliate links, as well as YouTube links and Reddit links. And it's the very same content that informs, and by the way, misinformed Google's generative results. Google search, it's just this lazy, ugly product, and it lacks any nuance. It doesn't have ingenuity. And quite frankly, I'm beginning to question whether it even has any

utility anymore. Searching for best laptop, and I mean this from Las Vegas, Nevada, beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, brings up this affiliate marketing funded tech site and then a link to Best Buy, then another affiliate funded site, then another link to Best Buy, then a series of questions you can click through which say things like, which brand of laptop is best. And when I click through the first one, by the way, it led me to a site called New Indian Express Deals, and it's just full of affiliate marketing links. No real journalism of any kind. It's all, it could be AI generated. I have no idea. And it's tons of these links to MacBooks and then things like a techno megabook or the Honor Magic Book, laptops that are not

available in America. Yeah, you know, one might imagine that the point of a search company is that it searches the web for you, surfacing things that you might find interesting or informative, that you might not find otherwise, highlighting individual publishers that made great content that otherwise might get lost in the churn of the internet, which makes billions and billions of pages, so much to find the great morass of the web. That's what Google is meant to be. Yet the reality is that Google wants to highlight the same companies

and the same publishers doing the same thing in the same way because Google, at its core, is a fundamentally lazy company that does not care about its customers. As I related in the man who killed Google's search, Google's revenue arms are the ones pulling levers at the company right now, and they demand more queries, as in more searches on the platform. even if doing so makes the platform so much worse, because when you optimize a platform for people to spend more time on it

and click on things more, you're not actually resolving a query or a problem. I know more queries are what they're looking for, but they're not talking about resolving queries. They're just looking for more of them so that they can show you more ads. But when you look at the state of Google right now, the current state of Google, you can see how these decisions have poisoned it.

Google Search moves around its menus, things like shopping, images, news, and videos based on what you're searching for. It pumps results full of sponsored content, YouTube videos, by the way, of course they own YouTube, so that's good for them. And then these arbitrarily chosen forum results, and then it deliberately obfuscates what might be a paid-for link. It's just this chaotically disorganized, nakedly manipulated piece of crap, let's be honest. And the search engine optimization industry has eaten it alive. and it really isn't clear whether Google lacks the ability to fix it or just doesn't really care that much. Yet the sorry state of Google's search did a little digging here might also be the result of Google distancing itself from the same search optimization community

that I've been kind of harsh on. While SEO is a field that's in arguably harmed Google's search results, it's also worth considering that outside of technical standards, like how fast the site loads or whether it has a site map of its links, Google also kind of hides things from the SEO community. They obfuscate what good looks like for fear that optimizers will use these standards to manipulate its results, which by the way happens anyway. So what Google does is instead of saying what good would be,

and I've kind of been wrong here, they vaguely say, yeah, you should kind of do this, but I'm not going to tell you exactly how. And then you get these people who still manipulate it anyway. It's so strange. this company worth trillions of dollars, they act like a plucky startup, but only when it comes to actual quality control. But nevertheless, I was quite interested in search optimization, so I got in Lily Ray, who's a 15-year SEO veteran, and she told me a really worrying story. I think that Google's kind of failing everybody. They're failing publishers.

They're failing SEO people. And they're failing you and me. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. Who's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah.

Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The yard herds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yardt Yard. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged, one erection.

Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Huber me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting. Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message.

Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-Ehart. Hey, everyone. It's Ryder Strong and Wilfredell from,

Podmeets World. And now the Podmeets Twirled podcast. We're two men who were completely clueless to reality TV who now have covered Dancing with the Stars, traitors, and we're gearing up for the season finale of Survivor. So yeah, now we're experts. I know we annoyed a lot of our listeners

by our severe lack of survivor knowledge. That is the point of the show. I'm just going to remind you. I have watched some Survivor. I obviously haven't watched enough. Did people not like like what was... Yeah. Just because we... Yeah. We'll be recapping the big conclusion in the 50th season, from the final attempts at gameplay, to the desperate pleas of finalists to a bunch of ha, ooh, ha, ooh, ha, ooh, again, we are experts.

So make sure to tune into Pod Meets Twirled for all our Survivor 50 takes. Listen to Pod Meets Twirled on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so you've been in SEO for about 15 years, but what actually is such engine optimization? for a very basic listener who's never dealt with it. Yeah, search engine optimization is the practice of trying to make certain websites and the pages on those websites more visible in search engines, by which I mean ranking in the top positions on Google, Bing, or whatever other search engine you're targeting,

because that's really where the majority of people click on results. Isn't that a little bit manipulative of Google and these things? How is that a good thing? So there's kind of a spectrum of approaches to SEO. There's, first of all, Google's own guidance related to how to do SEO in a way that I would argue is actually great for the internet. I think most of the things that Google is recommending and that people like myself who do SEO professionally day in and day out, what we're doing is making websites more findable, more accessible, you know, loading more quickly, easier for people to find what they're looking for. There's a lot of technical work that goes into that,

but of course there's the whole other end of the spectrum, which is people trying to take advantage of the situation and spam things and manipulate the search engine. So it depends which type of SEO you're talking about. So there are white hat SEO people. It's not just all people. Absolutely. Absolutely. So what do you do for your job? What is the thing you make your customers do? Well, you know, companies come to us and they obviously want to get more visit. So we have to look at all the different considerations and all the different factors that influence how people are able to find that content. A lot of it's technical. So literally a lot of our work is like, you know, focusing on page speed, focusing on overall accessibility. And, you know, for example, if an image is uploaded to a website that doesn't have image alt text, which is actually required for website accessibility, search engines can't understand what's on that image traditionally.

So we have to go in there and kind of add the right words in. So it's making that that content more findable. And again, a lot of that's technical, but a lot of that is content-oriented. So people might write a certain article in such a way that the way, you know, when people go to Google and they're looking for that article, they could never find it. So we're helping companies to kind of structure their content in a way where people can actually find what they're looking for. So you say that there are these signals. How much of that comes from the search engines themselves? Well, you know, the SEO field, because search engines are essentially a black box and a lot of us are working with, you know, just third party data or working the best we can with the analytics that Google and the other search engines give us.

A lot of this is guesswork. You know, we try to make informed guesses based on the data itself. But Google and the search engines do give us a lot of clues and a lot of insights about what we should be focusing on, especially when it comes to the technical thing. So, you know, giving us guidance about what we call like canonical tags or different metadata that we have to add to a website for them to really be able to parse and crawl through that website effectively. Those are direct signals that Google gives us that we work with. But a lot of it is kind of, you know, interpreting what we're seeing as far as what the data shows and then making informed guesses based on the history and on the analysis that we do for

different clients. So based on how Google describes it, they're fairly communicative. with web developers and, sorry, web content creators, it doesn't actually sound like that is true. I would say when it comes to the technical side of things, Google's quite communicative. You know, it's really in their best interest to have, you know, fast websites, websites that are accessible for users,

websites that have a great user experience. And Google does a lot of developer conferences, a lot of communications on the technical side. And it's quite easy to, you know, kind of get in touch with them if you have a specific technical question. And, like, for example, John Mueller hosts Webmaster hangouts on Google often, if not like, several times per month where he answers a lot of people's questions. So, yes, technically speaking, I think they do provide a lot of guidance. But what about content?

Because it seems like content, the actual things on the web page is the thing that actually matters here. Does Google give any guidance? They certainly do give guidance. For example, they give a lot of questionnaires that site owners can follow when thinking about. about what Google considers helpful content. They also have something called the search quality writer guidelines, which is a document that you can find online. It's about maybe 160 plus pages.

And that's specifically used to inform Google's human search quality evaluator team as to what good content or bad content kind of looks like. So that's something that the SEO community looks at a lot as well. But to your point, you know, getting into granular questions about is this content good or bad for Google? What does helpful content mean? That's become trickier in the last few years because they can't tell us everything

because people spam everything that they can get their hands on. Right. So it almost feels like a kind of a battle. Yes, absolutely. But to this level, to this point, you say they give this advice and they're vague on the content, but direct on the technical. So how has Google search quality got so much worse then? There's so many different factors at play.

You know, I think the reason why SEOs have a bad reputation in general, and to your question earlier, you know, is there such a thing as Whitehead SEO? There's a huge spectrum of approaches and beliefs within the SEO space. For whatever reason, the people that spam Google the most are the ones that have been kind of creating this, like the kind of the reputation that we have as an industry lately. And I get that because they've been quite successful. You know, a lot of people that are spamming Google, especially with AI lately. have really made it into top positions.

So they're getting a lot of visibility with those tactics. But there's a lot of us that are doing work that, again, it's kind of advised by search engines to do because it really does make the Internet easier for everybody to use. So that's been a challenge lately. I think that for whatever reason, maybe because Google's shifted internally so much of its focus to AI lately, obviously there's these big external challenges

that Google's facing as a business lately. maybe they're not, haven't been as focused on search quality for whatever reason. I don't actually have, you know, any type of evidence of that other than what I'm seeing, but I haven't seen as much spam and like SEO manipulation as I've seen over the last year or so. That being said, they're really cracking down on it in the last few months. So sometimes it just takes them a while to catch up. Something you've said publicly recently is real businesses are being affected by the most recent Google, updates? Can you kind of get into that?

Who are the people being affected here? Yeah, I mean, that's nothing new. I think Google creates these algorithm updates multiple times, big ones, at least multiple times per year, every year. And we've seen a lot of companies get caught up in those algorithm updates before. In most cases, they're doing something that goes against Google's SEO or spam guidelines. The difference now is that there's a lot of these new types of algorithm updates that Google is launching that are affecting.

a lot in a lot of people in the publishing space. So both large and small publishers, especially smaller publishers over the last couple of years. And these are, for example, people that might have built a business doing travel blogging, doing recipe blogging, product reviews. And so if you do consider those people a business, and I think they would because they often have staff, they have people going to the places, writing the travel reviews, things like this, Google's dramatically reduced the visibility of, you know, how those sites appear on Google

and the amount of traffic that they're getting. So when was the last major update to Google? Sometime in March, right? Or it's unclear when it actually started and finished. Yeah, the last major update, I would say, was the March core update, which took 45 days to complete, but that started in early March and then ended in April. But there's been a few different aspects of that update and new spam policies that they've introduced as well. So we're actually still kind of in the middle of some of that rollout happening.

Yeah, it's strange, though. You, and this is not on you. This is on Google. You say there's technical things they say. There's quality things they say. But even recipe sites look terrible. They're full of ads. They make your phone so hot it burns you. Okay, maybe not that hot. But it feels like Google doesn't actually seem to be maintaining quality. And it seems like they almost fight those who do in SEO. How do you feel about your relationship with Google? It's hard to say right now. I think, you know,

with something that's been very tricky for me is that I have a bit of a, I've built a bit of a name for myself as the person that goes around and really echoes a lot of what they recommend site owners do. That's been kind of my brand for the last several years. Google has different, you know, policies and things that they recommend to site owners that I have found, I would say up until 2023,

I've found those recommendations to be very consistent with the work that we're doing for our clients. So it's very easy for me to go say, yeah, what Google says to do is what works, right? And we've worked with a lot of different companies and found those tactics and those recommendations to be very effective. The last few months, that's changed a bit for me. I'm not. How so? Well, I'm not, you know, my personal relationship with them.

is I want to be very careful to say, like, you know, the people that I know that work at Google and they, you know, speak on behalf of Google, like this has nothing to do with them, right? This has to do with what's happening in the search results. And, you know, when I see AI spam ranking above my clients for what we call top stories, so that's, you know, the news features on Google, for example, or I see that in Google's new AI overviews is getting everything so many different things wrong and there's spam. and there's malware in there, like, things like this. It's just, it makes us as SEOs look bad because we then have to go defend those results to our clients and try to make sense of them. And that's been really challenging and very frustrating for me lately

because it's very hard to defend the quality of the search results when the search results are in a state of very poor quality. So you, and you said previously up until 2023, was it what happened in 2024? Was it the core update? Was there just something that happened this year writ large? I think that probably the biggest change that happened was honestly chat GPT. That's one of many big changes, but not only chat GPT,

but the different tools like it empowered spammers and SEOs alike to find new ways to speed up what they were doing and to create a lot of terrible content at scale. And that worked extremely well for a year because guess what? It takes Google and the other search engines a while to kind of figure out what they're doing, to develop new algorithms and new spam policies that devalue or demote that type of content. But there was about a year where that content was succeeding extremely well. So towards the end of 2023, you would see a ton of AI generated spam in the search results and people using AI tools in new and different ways to just accelerate whatever spamming they were doing.

do you think Google actually has control of search or has it just kind of got out of hand? I think they, you know, they had these new set of updates beginning in March 24 where I think that they made loud and clear that they're not messing around. You know, they really cracked down on a lot of sites that were doing a lot of different SEO tactics and spam tactics. So I do think they're getting control back. I do actually also think they kind of overstepped in some areas. And there's a lot of collateral damage there as well, which I know they're working on. And that's where you hear a lot of people saying, you know, this destroyed my business, because there were a lot of people that just had no idea that they were going to get caught up in that.

So that's on the search side. I think, you know, Google's proven time and time again that they can eventually get ahead of it. But I think they're presented with a lot of new and different challenges right now. On the AI side, you know, I'm sure eventually they'll figure it out, or this AI overview thing will get better over time. But it's been quite interesting to see publicly this week so many examples of Google's new AI overviews getting information blatantly wrong.

I want to push back a little bit about the control over search that Google has. The reason I ask that is it's not been just chat GPT, going back to 2020. Results have been bad for a long time. and it feels that Google is fighting SEO, and SEO I realize there's a much wider umbrella because there's people trying to do the web properly, there's people who are just trying to mess with Google,

and then there are the people who just don't care and are spamming. It's just, it doesn't feel like they're able to make quick changes. I just don't understand it. It drives me insane, honestly. Yeah, well, one of the other things that I didn't mention that's been a big change to the quality of search results and one of the big complaints that people are having is a lot of big sites with a lot of authority on Google,

a lot of SEO history, a lot of the big publishers that we all know, you know, big brands that everybody's familiar with, found a lot of SEO opportunities in the last couple of years that have worked splendidly for them. So, for example, affiliate content. You might have noticed that nearly every big publisher on the internet has ventured into product reviews in the last couple of years. And that's because it's a huge moneymaker.

So one of the big complaints that people have is like, It's not fair that XYZ big publisher shows up every time I'm typing best running shoes for women or whatever the keyword is. And believe it or not, I think this has been one of the biggest complaints that people have had. But in the last two or three months, Google is cracking down on that in a very big way. I think it's just taking them a long time to figure out specifically how to target that. Why do you think it takes them so long? They're worth like two trillion. Sure, they have the people.

I wonder the same things myself sometimes. I'm not a search ranking engineer, so I don't know why. I also, I think you know better than I do what's going on internally at their company right now. I think there's a lot of a lot of kind of pandemonium in different ways. I don't know, but it seems that way. But that being said, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, go on. No, you go on.

I was just going to say, another reason why this is so difficult for them to target is because not all of this is easy to spot algorithmically. For example, if a publisher decides to start working with third-party contributors who are contributing product review content, those relationships are not always entirely clear to a point where an algorithm wouldn't necessarily be able to figure that out. So Google has to use a variety of different methods to demote that content and learn about those business relationships, and you can't just solve that all algorithmically. Do you think they want to solve it? Um, I would imagine, yeah, they want to do it algorithmically instead of using their web spam team. But currently they're using their web spam team. So that's real human beings that are sending out what they call manual actions or penalties to sites that are engaged in different types of spam policies. And they've created some new ones recently.

It just feels like they could, I say this not as an SEO expert, but it feels like they could do very obvious things. They could go and go with dot Meredith, who has the map, who you read, hello, uh, how. Housefresh's whole thing around how Meredith has been basically spamming affiliate marketing content that's not particularly well done. And you've written about this as well. It feels like they could just do something to them immediately. That why don't they take these fast actions? Because it doesn't seem like they're doing much anyway. Well, a lot of these publishers have content that a lot of people really love. And, you know, Google has a lot of signals that indicate that these are, you know, sites that produce extremely helpful content in a lot of different categories.

So it's not so easy to say, this category of the website is not okay by users, but this one is. It starts to become tricky when they have to go after certain sections of a website. A lot of times with sites that are just doing pure spam, it'll be the whole site that's doing spam. But these are obviously, not to mention, these are very, very big brands. You can't remove a site from Google or demote a site from Google if it's a brand that people are looking for a brand that people would expect to see, right? Because that makes the result. I mean, you can. Sort of. Well, it's kind of, I think what I'm getting at is what they judge as good for the internet doesn't necessarily seem so because there's a self-fulfilling prophecy there.

There is, oh, this is popular with a bunch of people. Well, maybe it's popular because Google made it popular. Maybe it's not actually, it's just an algorithmic choice. But I'll get, I'll get on to something a little more direct, which is, how do you feel about AI search? Like Google's new AI overviews? Yes, yes. SGE, search generative experience. It's like, obviously, we're in a big transition moment where, you know, speaking about it now is not reflective of what it's going to look like in six months.

So I always want to be cognizant of like, this thing changes every single day. My biggest issue with it, so first of all, Google made it public, you know, a week ago at Google I. and myself and many others have been experimenting with it in Google Labs for a year before that. And in theory, with AI, it should be improving and learning and getting better every day, right? For a year, myself and many others were raising flags about quality issues and also the fact that we just didn't feel like it often provided that much of an improvement to the existing search results. For example, Google already had featured snippets. So if they want to take a paragraph or a snippet from somebody's website and display that directly in the search results, there was already a mechanism for that.

So for the past year, you know, I've raised a million different examples of when it got things wrong, when I think it was, you know, responding to some type of super controversial question in a weird way, whatever it was. And when they launched it, you know, literally I can tell you because I spend my whole life at SEO conferences, most of us were like, there's no way that can launch this thing in its current form. It's just so not ready, right? And they did. And here we are a week later. And nearly every, you know, social media site has tons of examples of people wanting to turn it off. The tons of examples of it getting things wrong. So, you know, I want to be cognizant and respectful of the fact that it will change, it will get better. I'm just quite surprised that they launched it in its current form when they did. One last question, and don't take this the wrong way, but why do you think they'll improve? Because the last few years, because the last few years, have shown that they've got worse. Well, in theory, these AI LLMs should learn and improve and get better and get retrained all the time.

I'm going off with that optimistic idea. But at the same time, it's like we're doing, you know, offloading this work onto Google searchers and relying on them to provide feedback and everything is, I guess it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to go in the right direction. So it's a good point. It's hard to say. Yeah, it's just, it feels almost like the AI side. is getting away from what search is meant to do. Because search is meant to help you find useful things.

And this doesn't even seem to be capable of helping you find the right answer, let alone a good link. Yeah. I think the main issue that I currently have with it is that once I know that it's 20 or 10% wrong, or whatever the number is, we don't know the actual percentage of wrong answers. You know, based on how many we've already seen in the last week, it's quite a lot. So when people know that this thing has a tendency to be wrong, will they trust it? Right? And what does that do for trust in Google overall? Because with featured snippets, at least you can say, okay, this comes from this website, you can blame that website because they pull that data verbatim when they're showing a featured snippet. With AI overviews, it's like there's a tendency that one of these sentences is completely wrong and it's pulled from an 11-year-old Reddit thread that was making a joke.

And we just don't know which sentence it is, right? Right. It just, it feels like they're almost moving against the internet. It's just a very, very depressing thing to watch. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think I would have expected this thing to be more fact-based, more evidence-based in its rollout. I would have expected it to show for far fewer queries where getting things wrong is extremely dangerous. So, yeah, I mean, like our industry now is digging into the data. And we're finding that it seems like health is actually one of the categories where AI overviews trigger the most of topics. That's genuinely scary. But okay, actual last question here. What is the thing that Google could change to get better?

Huh. I mean, I would imagine they're working on a lot of the feedback that they've gotten in the last week with the AI overviews and finding a lot of examples where it gets things wrong. and if they're going to continue with AI reviews, I would hope that they dramatically improve the product as quickly as possible. That's on the AI front. I mean, if you want to be, if you want to completely... In general, with search.

Yeah, with search. I think that they should reassess this notion of helpful content because I think that they've, inadvertently caused a lot of sites that are truly producing helpful, experience-driven content to lose a lot of visibility in the last year or so. And a lot of, like, you know, we're still seeing a lot of big brands seemingly able to show up for every possible query, and we're not hearing enough from small publishers.

We're not giving small publishers enough of a chance for their content to compete. And they're kind of, at this point, Google just seems to be blasting Reddit everywhere for everything, maybe as a solution to that because, yeah, you get a lot of first-hand experience from Reddit, but I'm not sure that putting Reddit in top positions for so many different queries is a solution either. So personally, I'd like to see a broader diversity of the types of websites that are able to repeat. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier.

This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an Acapella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation.

The group. The yard herds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yard. But they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged.

One erection Listen to humor me with Robert Smygle and friends On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me I need some jokes to make me seem funny Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster,

I hearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com.

Hey, everyone. It's Ryder Strong and Wilfredel from PodMeets World. And now the PodMeets Twirled podcast. We're two men who were completely clueless to reality TV, who now have covered Dancing with the Stars, traitors, and we're gearing up for the season finale of Survivor. So yeah, now we're experts. I know we annoyed a lot of our listeners by our severe lack of survivor knowledge.

That is the point of the show. I'm just going to remind you. I have watched some Survivor. I obviously haven't watched enough. Did people not like it? Yeah. Just because we? Yeah.

We'll be recapping the big conclusion in the 50th season. From the final attempts at gameplay, to the desperate pleas of finalists, to a bunch of Ha, ooh, ha, ha, ooh. Again, we are experts. So make sure to tune into PodMeets Twirled for all our Survivor 50 takes. Listen to PodMeets Twirled on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The problem, it seems, is that this multi-trillion dollar tech company, one that has a monopoly over the internet's information, is somehow weak, weak and powerless when faced with people that create websites specifically to trick it. Google, a company that sells to militaries and governments and professional.

sports leagues that makes tens of billions of dollars a quarter and employs nearly 200,000 people is incapable of thwarting a hodgepodge industry full of nakedly craven bad actors. Or they're just unwilling to intervene because Google doesn't really care about anything other than how many times people search and how many ads they see. And they don't really mind if maybe this big mess of crap makes the whole thing worse. This problem, it's been going on for years and I feel crazy every time I talk about Google search as a product and as a business, that such an incredibly profitable and ubiquitous product can be so utterly shoddy and regularly unfit for the task. I feel insane. I feel crazy when I see article after article about Sondar Pashai and Google,

talking about the remarkable success of Google, yet never the fact that they've done so much to damage this search engine. And they've so blatantly destroyed their core product. And what really upsets me is the sheer contempt that Google seems to have for its customers. Google search is awful. It's a terrible, unreliable product, and now they've made it even less reliable with the introduction of generative AI. And yet, Sundar Peshai, the CEO of Google, stride into interviews all piss and vinegar and ramble about how he values independent sources and more authentic voices as his service continually fails to service unique, interesting or useful content. Nile Patel of the Verge got a lot of credit for giving Peshire a tough interview, but I'm going to be bloody honest.

Paper Tiger. It's just another opportunity for a Google executive to vaguely suggest that they care about search without really being held accountable. The question is, Sondar, why is Google so bad now? And he will give you some vague PR spiel. Show him results. Nile did show him Chromebook results. The thing to do would be come with a few results and show him in front of him and say, why is this so bad?

Why, Sundar? And if you can get him to say on the record, actually, I think it's good, that says everything. What it says is he's a liar and he doesn't really care. But I guess the interview did that anyway. Look, the problem, other than the fact that Google should be broken up and that search should be a public utility or a non-profit, it is that the media seems to continually lack the ability to simplify the problem. Google search is bad and it's been bad for a while.

Results are worse. They're full of spam and low-quality content. Google does a terrible job of maintaining the content on Google Search, and it's now introduced an AI to search through these results that makes things worse by generating answers based on search results from a search engine that's rotting in real time. And then it hallucinates the results anyway. Oh, God, I apologize. and getting a little bit head up, but this whole thing just, it kills me. It makes me feel a little bit

nuts because if any of us, anyone listening to this, went into our jobs and our trousers were down and our bits were out and we were walking in and we go in and we half do our job and the job's terribly done, would we get fired? We'd get fired. I think we'd get fired. Maybe if the crap work we did made money, but we'd still be in trouble for our willies hanging out. And that's the thing. None of these tech executives, even when faced with the media, seem to actually be held accountable. And Google acts without integrity, and they just act with this stunning contempt for their customers. I've said it before, but it bears repeating. Sandhapashai is a goddamn management consultant, a former McKinsey freak,

with little interest in providing users with any kind of usable service, and his cronies, people like Prabagar Ragavann and Liz Reed. By the way, Prabagar has been upgraded to head of a bunch of things, now, and Liz Reid is now the head of search, it's so good he picked his successor, and it's so good that this person loves AI. And these people, they've continually helped Google put out bad software, all in pursuit of perpetual growth. And I believe they're part of a larger problem in the tech industry. Tech firms are no longer building things for customers. Big tech, and honestly far too many startups, they're creating these products that are more like symbolic capital for investors, so that they can place

bets on them and say, ah, maybe Red War here. No, maybe black this time, maybe double zero. And these things, they only exist to express meteorite growth, 10x, 20x, 30x returns, things that sound satisfying for people to chirp on CNBC without ever actually really having to provide the service they're discussing. I'm not being honest, it's breaking my harm. As I said in my last episode, I'm not a pessimist. I'm more of a broken-hearted romantic. There was a time, and it wasn't super long ago, that tech was exciting and fun and interesting. When things came out that subtly or avertedly, they changed our lives, they made things better, they maybe connected us, or they made our time on our own better and more substantive, and things felt like they were progressing.

Yet it feels like so much of today's tech industry is focused on shipping products that nobody asked for, to fix problems that don't exist, all while demanding applause for a future that they've yet to make a reality. Cryptocurrency, the Metaverse, now generative AI, they're all trends that built this kind of pseudo-religious movement to carry water for products that didn't do what they said they would, guilt-tripping those that said otherwise for not being optimistic enough about an industry that's continually failed to give us hope for the future. And it's disgraceful. It's disgraceful.

Look at Facebook from my last episodes. Look at that website, that multi-billion dollar website. Look how bad it is. Look how full of AI spam and junk it is. Look how unsafe it is. Look at Google right now. Google search is falling apart at the seams. It kind of works, and sometimes it does.

Don't get me wrong. But for the most part, you just can't trust it anymore. And that was before they plug generative AI into it. Now the world's, probably the world's most profitable tech product, is just languishing. It's so much worse. And what's crazy is, I don't even know how they're going to make money from it, Because these AI results, they don't seem to connect to ads or anything.

They don't seem to make Google money. But because Sandhap Heshae needs to convince Wall Street, that Google will grow forever. Well, you've got to put AI in it, man. You've got to make the AI happen. Except regular people using this, they're going to get misinformed. Someone's going to die. And I really sound dramatic, I know, but they are. Because people use Google Search and rely on Google Search.

They rely on Google Search to give them real answers. to real queries, and we can laugh about the fact it said that someone had to eat a rock a day, but what if they're trying to put out a chemical fire? What if they're depressed, then they ask Google something? And Google tells them, I don't know. Some sort of weird CBD treatment, because Google got poisoned by an AI spam result. There is, by the way, a fake result about Google telling someone to jump off the Gong Gate Bridge. It's very fake, done for it.

But seriously, though, something like that's going to happen. And yeah, I'm sure someone will say, oh, it's just an edge case. I don't give a crap. An edge case where someone dies or is harmed or is misinformed. That's not worth it. It's not worth it. And these companies must learn. And I think what's going to happen is far simpler.

I think they believe that people are just going to keep using it because they have these horrible monopolies. I think at some point people are just not going to use search at all. I think that is the actual end result here. I think you see OpenAI create a search engine and it kind of is worse than this. I think you're going to see a proliferation of this tech as people desperately try and catch up with Google. And it's so distressing. It's so insulting to customers. Turns my bloody stomach.

I realize this wasn't a very positive podcast, but I hope it filled in the gaps for you. Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattosol. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Matersowski.com. M-A-T-T-T-O-S-O-S-K-I.com. You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com or visit Better Offline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.

Where's Your Ed dot at to visit the Discord and go to R-S-Better-O-Line to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite.

Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter.

Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The story I've told myself can then shape my behavior, and that can lead me to sabotage the possibility of connection. This Mental Health Awareness Month, tune into the podcast deeply well with Debbie Brown. If you've been searching for a soft place to land while doing the work to become whole, this podcast. is for you to hear more. Listen to deeply well with Debbie Brown from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcast. Why are we all so obsessed with romance? On the Radio 831 podcast, join us, Sanjana Basker and Tyler McCall, as we unpack all the trending tropes, fuzzy adaptations, book talk drama, and celebrity love stories with hot takes and sharp guests. Each episode digs into what these stories,

stories reveal about desire, fantasy, identity, and how we love now. Listen to the Radio 831 podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.