The Nugget

Google is intentionally degrading its search experience to increase user time on the site and ad revenue, moving toward an AI-driven model that proritizes prolonged engagement over quick, accurate information retrieval.

Make it stick

🤯 Intentional degradation: Google makes search worse on purpose to keep people scrolling and seeing more ads.
📉 Shrinkflation analogy: Just like products give you less for the same price, Google gives worse search results to keep people on the page longer.
🧩 Page 2 phenomenon: Google found people don't mind going to the second page of search results, which means more ads can be shown.
🛠️ AI’s dual role: AI is both a solution and a contributor to Google's search woes, aiming to keep users on Google but also creating content credibility issues.

Google executives believe it's beneficial for users not to find immediate answers so they can stay on the site and see more ads, which increases Google's revenue.
Large language models (LLMs) and AI integration in search create a paradox where AI can provide quick answers without users leaving Google but often produces inaccurate or nonsensical results.
Internal issues at Google have led to a degradation of their original search algorithms, not managing spam effectively and allowing AI-generated content to flood search results.

Google’s move to degrade search is not unique; many companies intentionally make their products worse to drive more sales (e.g., appliances breaking faster).
The integration of Reddit data by Google is seen as a desperate move to maintain a high-quality database after internal failures to manage content quality.
Comparing historical cases like mapping errors and telephone directories, Google's approach of potentially using misleading information to maintain control has precedent but with murkier modern implications.

If smaller, high-quality content sites go out of business due to Google's practices, the internet could become flooded with low-quality, AI-generated content, degrading the user experience.
Current competition from platforms like ChatGPT, which can be used to refine Google searches, could signify a shift if users find them more reliable than Google's offerings.
The future of search may involve local computation and community-generated data to counterbalance corporate-controlled, ad-driven search engines.

"Google is making search intentionally worse because Google, I mean objectively, it’s worse, but why? To keep you on-site longer."
"The original intention was to help people find stuff, and now they need to suffer a little bit so Google can make more money."
"If people didn’t mind making it to page two of search results, that means more ad revenue for Google."
"Google's current state feels like it's paralyzed by success, unable to pivot due to its own entrenched systems."
"It’s wild that AI-generated content is drowning out legitimate creators, showing Google’s asleep at the helm."

This summary contains AI-generated information and may have important inaccuracies or omissions.