What the hell happened to Google search?

LET’S SAY YOU want a list of Irish ministers.

So you google it, of course. The fact that it’s its own verb sums up pretty neatly Google’s total dominance of online search. ”I’ll Bing it,” said no-one, ever. (Sorry, Microsoft.)
Google.com is the world’s most used website. Ninety percent of internet searches go through the company’s search engine. It’s the front door to the internet, and a navigational tool on which we have become entirely dependent. Who among us has typed out a url in the last decade? Whether you have an Android or an Apple phone, that’s Google search you’re using when you open your browser.

But something has gone wrong. Search for “Irish ministers” and the top result is… Pat Breen? (The Journal checked this on several users’ desktop browsers with the same result.)

Breen was never a minister. He was a junior minister – and that was a while ago now. He lost his seat two elections ago, in 2020. A government website with a full list of current government ministers is quite a bit down the results page. 

Pat Breen, the Platonic ideal of an Irish minister, according to Google. Google Google

Sponsored posts

The utility of the search engine has been particularly eroded when it comes to anything that could be sold to you, with top results likely to all be from companies that have paid to skip up the ranking to a position where they would not have organically surfaced.

These paid-for top results, which take up more and more space on the search engine results page, are also partly based on your browsing history rather than what you are currently looking for.

So a search from an Irish location for “the best place to buy children’s shoes”, for instance, can contain sponsored top results for (a) shops that don’t sell children’s shoes or (b) British online-only retailers. (Good luck buying children’s shoes without trying them on.)

There are useful results amid the debris of sponsored links and below the paid-for top table, but it feels like harder work than it once was to find them. This isn’t helped by the fact that sponsored links are not very visually distinct from organic results. It’s hard not to click on them. 

Ads on search are how Google makes most of its money.

ChatGPT’s challenge to Google

And then, of course, there’s the new AI Overview that, for the past year, has appeared in response to certain types of queries.

Now, the integration of AI into search is about to be turbocharged as Google goes on the offensive against ChatGPT.

It may not be its own verb yet, but for many people, OpenAI’s chatbot is becoming as automatic and intuitive a go-to as Google.

Liz Carolan, a tech consultant and author of The Briefing newsletter, says that while Google hasn’t shared data on the drop-off in people using its search engine, all the signs are that the switch to ChatGPT has been “profound”. 

Where once we would have googled, “what time is the Eurovision”, now we are asking chatbots. So Google is becoming a chatbot too. 

In May, Google began to roll out the next step up from AI Overview.

AI Mode, which has been launched in the US, will deliver customised answers to users’ questions, including charts and other features, rather than serving up a lists of links. These answers will be personalised based on past browsing history. You will even be able to integrate it with your Gmail account to allow further personalisation.

At first, AI Mode will be a distinct option in search, but its features and capabilities will gradually be integrated into the core search product, Google has said.

Carolan says this will be as fundamental a change to how we interact with the internet as the original arrival of Google search.

“Instead of navigating between links, we’re going to end up using a single interface: a chatbot querying the websites that exist and delivering back to you its interpretation of that, in a conversational style,” she explains.

An example of an AI Overview result in Google. Google Google

AI nonsense

The first problem is, Google’s AI results can be nonsense. 

Kris Shrisnak, a senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties working on AI and tech, says people need to understand one fundamental point about the large language models (LLMs) on which chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini AI are based: they are not designed to be accurate. 

“When they’re accurate, they are coincidentally accurate,” Shrisnak says. “They’re accurate by accident, rather than by design.”

For example, Carolan recently wanted to check how many working days there are in June.

Google’s AI-generated top result helpfully explained that there are 21 working days and no public holidays in June. If you specify “in Ireland”, Google says there are 22 working days and no public holidays. 

Both answers are wrong. There are 20 working days in June, and the first Monday is always a public holiday. ChatGPT didn’t know that either. It counted the bank holiday twice.

Google isn't planning to take Monday off. Google Google

“It’s just blatantly inaccurate,” Carolan says. “People are relying on it, and it’s giving them inaccurate information.”

Aoife McIlraith, managing director of Luminosity Digital marketing agency, says Google had almost certainly released its AI search product sooner than it wanted to.

“There’s huge pressure on them. It’s the first time they actually had competition in the market for search. It will definitely get better, but it’s going to take some time,” McIlraith says.

Google defended AI Overviews, telling The Journal that people prefer search with this feature. It said AI Overview was designed to bring people “reliable and relevant information” from “top web results”, and included links.

Enshittification

Even setting aside the incorporation of undercooked AI answers into results, Google’s traditional search product does not seem to be working as well as it once did.

Journalist Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” in 2022 to describe the pattern whereby the value to users of platforms – be it Amazon, TikTok, Facebook or Twitter – gradually declines over time.

Doctorow argued that platforms start by offering something good to users (like an excellent search engine), then they abuse their users to serve business customers (search results buried under ads), and then they abuse both users and business customers to serve their shareholders.

Documents released in 2023 as part of a US Department of Justice antitrust case against Google gave a rare insider view of the top of the company, revealing that in 2019 there were tensions over the direction of search.

The documents suggested a boardroom struggle over whether Google’s search team should be more focused on the effectiveness of the product, or on growing the number of user queries (a better search engine would mean fewer queries, and therefore fewer ads viewed). In one email, the head of search complained his team was ”getting too involved with ads for the good of the product”.

Google said this weekend that this executive’s testimony at trial had “contextualised” these documents and clarified the company’s focus on users.

“The changes we launch to search are designed to benefit users,” Google said.

“And to be clear: the organic results you see in search are not affected by our ads systems.”

Carolan says it’s impossible to know exactly what has happened within Google’s algorithm, but the quality filters that were once in place to keep low-quality results further down the ranking seem to be struggling to hold back the tide.

Visibility on Google can be gamed using certain practices known as search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO is the reason why, for example, online recipes often contain weird, boring essays above the list of ingredients. All publishers use SEO, but the quality of search results is degraded when low quality websites are able to abuse SEO to boost their Google ranking.

“Maybe investment within search engines are going more towards AI than they are towards just sustaining the core search product,” Carolan says. “It’s very hard to say because all of this is happening in very untransparent ways. Nobody gets to see how decisions are being made.”

McIlraith says it’s widely believed in her industry that recent changes to Google’s algorithm – in particular an August 2022 update called, ironically, “Helpful Content” – have corrupted results.

She believes this is having a bigger impact in smaller markets such as Ireland, with more .co.uk websites appearing in Irish users’ results, for example.

“A lot of people in my industry have been shouting about this, particularly in the past 18 months,” McIlraith says.

Google said it makes thousands of changes to search every year to improve it, and it’s continuously adapting to address new spam techniques.

“Our recent updates aim to connect people with content  that is helpful, satisfying and original, from a diverse range of sites across the web,” it said.

For what it’s worth, Shrisnak doesn’t use Google now, favouring DuckDuckGo, an alternative search engine based on Google that feels a lot like the Google of old. It doesn’t collect user data (and is capable of correctly identifying the current government of Ireland).

What happens next?

Google says AI is getting us to stay where it wants us: on Google. 

CEO Sundar Pichai has suggested that AI encourages users to spend more time searching for answers online, growing the overall advertising market. Google says AI Overviews have increased usage by 10% for the type of queries that show overview results.

Soon, Irish users are likely to see advertising integrated into AI Overview.

The company is telling advertisers this will be a powerful tool, putting their ads in front of us at an important, previously inaccessible moment when we are just beginning to think about something.

But AI raises existential questions for the production of content for the web as we know it, both in its ability to generate content and as it’s being applied in search.

In the jargon of digital marketing, the problem is known as “zero click”. You ask Google a question and get an answer – maybe an AI-generated one – without ever having to click on a blue link.

McIlraith says: “The biggest challenge for all of my clients and the wider industry is that Google is flatly refusing to give us any data around zero click. We cannot see how much our brand is showing up in search results where no click is being attributed.”

Until now, there was an unwritten contract: websites provided Google with information for free, and benefited from Google-generated traffic. This contract is broken when Google morphs into a single interface scraping the web to feed its AI in a way that negates the need to click through links to websites to find information.

“The challenge then really becomes, why would I create content?” McIlraith says. “Why would I create content on my website just for these AIs to come along and scrape it?” 

Already there are challenges to ChatGPT’s practices, with publishers led by the New York Times suing OpenAI over its use of copyrighted works.

News/Media Alliance, the trade association representing all the biggest news publishers in the US, last month condemned AI Mode as “the definition of theft”.

“Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue,” the alliance said. “Now Google just takes content by force.”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai was grilled about this by US tech news website The Verge last week. He said AI Mode would provide sources, adding that for the past year Google has been sending traffic to a broader base of websites and this will continue. 

He did not give a definitive answer when asked by whether a 45% increase in web pages over the past two years was the result of more of the web being generated by AI, stating that “people are producing a lot of content”.

Carolan speculates that in the single interface, linkless future, with the business model of web publishing broken, the risk is that the internet starts to eat itself: regurgitating AI slop rather than sustaining the production of original material. The information Google’s AI Mode and ChatGPT and the rest are feeding off will then degrade. Late stage enshittification.

AI search itself may improve, but these improvements will be undermined by this disintegration of the information environment.