Factually! with Adam Conover - How Google RUINED the Internet

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

(In addition to your weekly Factually! episode, this week we're bringing you a monologue from Adam. This short, researched monologue originally aired on the Factually! YouTube page, but we to start sharing audio versions of these monologues with our podcast audience as well. Please enjoy, and stay tuned for your regularly scheduled episode of Factually!) You may have noticed that Google isn't what it used to be. Search results are buried under ads and sponsored links, and when you do find a result, it's overflowing with SEO garbage. You aren't imagining things: the internet is getting quantifiably worse. In this video, Adam explains how the same Google that once helped make the internet more accessible to countless people has doomed the internet itself for the foreseeable future.Get 20% off DeleteMe US consumer plans when you go to http://joindeleteme.com/Adam and use promo code ADAM at checkout. DeleteMe International Plans: https://international.joindeleteme.com/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. Hey, folks, Adam here. If you're a longtime listener to this podcast, you might have noticed that we are publishing this episode on a different day than normal, with a different runtime than normal and a different title than normal. What the heck is going on? Well, let me fill you in.

See, on my YouTube channel for the past couple of years, I've been publishing monologues, which instead of long, unscripted conversations, are shorter focused explainers that I write and research with my team. We research the heck out of interesting topics. We write a lot of jokes about stuff that we really care about, and then we share it with you.

Well, we have decided to start sharing those monologues on the podcast in audio form, because hey, maybe you wanna enjoy them while you're on your way to work. You know, you can't be looking at a YouTube video because then you might crash into the back of a potato chip truck. And that would be delicious, but very deadly for you and your family. So now you can get it either on my YouTube channel or in podcast form

right here on the Factually Feed. Without further ado, let's take it away. Enjoy this monologue. And thank you so much for listening. Have you noticed that lately Google sucks ass? It was supposed to be the greatest information retrieval tool in history, but now, even when you search for something basic, the results are full of AI garbage, fake product reviews,

and so many ads you might as well send your search query straight to the spam bots. It's gotten so bad that now I literally add a Reddit to my search terms because at least that way the garbage I get back was written by actual human dorks. Well, you're not making it up. A recent study found that higher ranked pages aren't on average more search engine optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and show signs of lower text quality. That means the higher a page is ranked on Google, the worse it literally is. But you know what? According to the study, it's not just Google. It's every search engine, which means the internet itself is actually getting worse right before our eyes.

So what the hell happened? How did the internet turn from the modern Library of Alexandria into a free little library full of dog dookie? Well, the answer is that it's all Google's fault. In this video, I'm going to tell the story of how a scrappy little search engine that pledged not to be evil became a ruthless monopoly that not only ruined their own core product, but turned the entire internet into an endless river of shit. But first, I'd like to thank Delete Me for sponsoring this video. And second, I know one corner of the internet

that isn't shit, our Patreon community. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover and you can support this show and join a community of smart, curious people who love to talk about how screwed up the world is. Plus you get every monologue and podcast episode I put out ad free. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover to join us.

We'd love to have you. And as always, if you want to come see me do standup comedy on the road, head to adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates. You know, I'm old enough to remember the magical early years of the internet. You'd wait for your mom to hang up on Aunt Barbara, fire up your compact Brasarios 2400 bod modem,

and boom, you'd be on the world wide web. An entire new digital universe, full of people from all over the globe, publishing fascinating things. Just one problem, there was no way to find any of it, because search engines back then did not work at all. Alta Vista, Lycos, that fancy pants butler with the shitting smirk on his face.

The results they'd give you were useless and random. You'd type Stone Cold Steve Austin and it'd give you the weather report for Texas. One time, I searched how to tie a tie on Lycos and the little dog took a dump on my desktop. I'm not kidding! That really happened to me! But then, in 1998, two engineers named Sergei Brin and Larry Page came up with an amazing new invention, a search engine that actually worked.

It was called Back Rub. And then when they realized that sounded a little bit too much like low-grade sexual harassment, they changed the name to Google. Google used the fundamental structure of the web itself, the links between pages, to figure out with eerie accuracy which pages were the most relevant. And I really cannot overemphasize what a big deal it was in 1998 to get real information this quickly. It was the second best form of Instagramification a teenage boy could get his hands on.

And it helped you find the first a lot more quickly. Even better, Google pledged that they were a new kind of tech company, one that actually wanted to make the internet a better place. In fact, their company motto was literally, Don't be evil. Oh, look, they even put it on the wall so employees could walk up and stare at it. Well, someone should warn Mr. Shorts and Sandals at work there, because in the years since, sh**'s gotten pretty evil.

Over the past two decades, Google results have gone from this, simple, streamlined, as clean and clear as the acne face wash I was using back then, to an oily, disgusting mess covered with ads, shopping referral links, and YouTube videos that, surprise, surprise, also play ads. Google's interface is now so crammed with advertising that a Washington Post report found you now have to scroll six times further down the page to get to the first real unpaid link to an outside website.

It's like if in order to cross a bridge, you first had to drive your car into Sh** River. So why would Google purposefully make their revolutionary, industry-defining search engine worse and harder to use? Simple. It's because at the end of the day, Google isn't a search company at all. It's also not an email company, a video company, or a smartphone company. It's an advertising company.

See, Google could have come up with a business model that put our needs first. They could have allowed us to pay them for a better class of service, or sold autographed prints of the Google Doodle, or whatever. But no, they chose a different path, one in which you are not the customer at all. Instead, you're the product, because Google's real revenue source is selling you and all the data they have on you to advertisers.

Google themselves say that we earn most of our money by showing ads. Huh, I think most might be a little bit of an understatement. Let's check the actual number. Oh, okay. In 2023, advertisers paid Google $237 billion. Is your broke ass pan Google $237 billion a year? Mine sure isn't. That means that Google's real job is keeping Pfizer and Johnny Spamalot happy, not you.

And that objectively makes Google worse. According to two researchers at Stanford, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results, and we expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. You know who wrote those words? It was Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google. They wrote those words in 1998 in the famous paper that introduced Google. These motherfuckers knew the entire time that selling ads was the original sin of search

engines and would ruin their product. But you know what they did? They backed up the money truck anyway and buried their principles in a giant fucking pile of cash. In the years since, Google has steadily worked to make their search engine better for advertisers and worse for you. They made it harder to tell the difference between an ad and a real link. They cut thousands of search quality

raiders whose job it was to make sure Google's results are high quality and they demoted their head of search, an original engineer who helped build the search engine and spent decades making sure it was fast and effective and replaced him with the head of the advertising department. That's right, the most important widely used information retrieval tool on earth is now being run by the guy from the f***ing spam department. The fact that as citizens the main tool we use to get information about the world, our political system, about our own health, is an algorithm run by the world's largest advertising company is supremely

f***ed up. It's like getting nutrition tips from Ronald fucking McDonald. Google tracks you, they monitor what you do on the internet, and then they sell all the data they have on you to advertisers. And the worst part is they then use all that money to make sure you have no other choice. Now, before we get into that, if you wanna keep your personal information

off of search engines, you absolutely need to check out Delete Me. Whoa, whoa, whoa, I didn't say delete me. I'm talking about Delete Me. If you've watched this channel before, you know how important information privacy is. Big tech companies aren't the only ones hoovering up your data.

There are bad actors out there called data brokers who make a living buying and selling your information. Delete Me's teams of experts scour the web to find and remove your personal information for you to keep your info out of the clutches of data brokers and keep you safe. And you know what? Because I also want to keep my family safe from data brokers, I am thrilled that DeleteMe now offers family account management. You can seamlessly add your family members and loved ones to your account, creating a

unified hub for family privacy protection, complete with unique data sheets per family member. That means you can keep your family members safe no matter what their age is, whether you're looking to protect your parents or your children, or maybe parents who behave like children when they get calls from a scammer. And best of all, now you can get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to joindeleteeme.com slash Adam and use the promo code Adam at checkout. That's joindeleteeme.com slash Adam

and use promo code Adam. Okay, take me back now. You know, it wouldn't be that big a deal for Google to suck as hard as it does if there were another option. But here's the worst part. Google uses the massive resources they get from selling you to advertisers to make sure that you have nowhere else to go. Sure, at first Google won the search market fair and square by having the best product.

Alta Vista went hasta la vista, the light ghost dog was sent to a nice farm family upstate, and Ask Jeeves, well, he's not even the logo anymore because he killed himself. But once they achieved dominance, Google started using their advertising billions to buy their way to a monopoly so that no one could do to them what they did to poor Jeeves. Google pays Mozilla upwards of $450 million a year to be the primary search engine in the Firefox browser, and they pay Apple as much as $15 billion a year to be the primary search engine in the Firefox browser. And they pay Apple as much as $15 billion a year to be the default search engine in Safari. That's right, the fruit company is getting more than the entire GDP of Laos just to stop

you from binging s***. Of course, Google doesn't have to pay anyone to be the default for the most popular phone and web browser, that's because their monopolistic asses already own them. It can take 15 clicks to change your default search engine on a Google browser, so most people never bother. These defaults are so powerful in shaping user behavior that Google now owns 90% of the search market, and it is almost impossible for new search engines to break in, even if they're actually better. In 2018, two former Google employees left the company

to build a new, better search engine. And you know what? They actually did it. Their site, Neva, had no ads. Instead, it focused on getting you actual results as quickly as possible. And almost everyone who tried it thought it was better than Google in every way.

But when you're fighting against a monopolist, being the best isn't good enough. Neva found that Google's default position in almost every browser was so entrenched and powerful, it was impossible to get people to switch to or even try their search engine. And since they didn't have $15 billion to pay off Tim Cook, after a few years, they shut down just another corpse buried in Google's basement. So why does Google suck now? Well, why would they bother to make their search engine work better when they can just buy their way to being the only search engine?

But hey, I know what you're thinking. There's a couple other teeny tiny search engines out there. There's Bing, there's DuckDuckGo, and hey, you're a tech savvy millennial, you'll just change your default search engine and go back to petting doggos, laughing emoji. But here's the real problem. No matter what search engine you use,

your search results are still going to suck because Google is now so dominant, so powerful that their choices shape the very internet itself. See, if you're not in the top Google results for a certain search term, your website is basically invisible. So a powerful industry of search engine optimization, or SEO, has sprung up to help publishers sleaze their way to the top of the results.

SEO is the process of gaming Google's search algorithm, giving it exactly what it wants so that it always displays your page first, regardless of whether or not it's actually the best. Google actually encourages publishers to use SEO techniques. The problem though, is that using these techniques generally makes your website suck ass. So there's this website called HouseFresh where experts rigorously test air purifiers and then publish the results.

That's literally all they do. They're an example of what the internet was supposed to be. An independent site run by real experts writing reliable articles that are actually useful. And Google is slowly murdering them. In a blog post earlier this year, HouseFresh revealed how they were being massacred in the Google rankings by SEO optimized content farms that just pretend to review air purifiers to game the algorithm.

The purifiers these sites recommend suck so hard, actually they don't suck hard, they suck poorly, that's the point of an air purifier, that it is obvious that no one involved with these sites has even seen them in person, much less tested them. But that doesn't matter, because all Google cares about is that these sites use the keywords rigorous testing and lab team and expert on their pages. Why spend the money to actually do those things or even buy an air purifier when you can just

tell Google's idiot algorithm the magic fucking words? Let's be clear Google's only actual job as a search engine is to send me to good sites like house fresh rather than bullshits spam sites But no Google says here's a piece of site that lists some pieces products and it's number one. Aren't you feeling lucky? some piece of s*** products and it's number one. Aren't you feeling lucky? Optimizing your site for Google's algorithm doesn't make it better. It makes it worse, less readable, less useful,

and less honest. But a site's Google rank has become so existentially important that now at least 80% of all websites use SEO in some form. 80%. That's why every time you look up a recipe now, it starts with, When I started Best Cooking Blog, I never thought it would really be Best Cooking Blog. But now people come up to me and say, Wow, you really do have the best cooking blog for

best recipes, tasty recipes, go-to recipes, and also the best tasty go-to recipes for hungry daughters. Anyway, I'm going to be sharing my best tasty go-to recipe for how to hard boil an egg. First, buy an egg. When online shopping for best deals on tasty eggs, I... Whoa! This f***ing sucks.

It doesn't matter what search engine you use because the entire internet is now just an endless stream of generic content-free SEO barf. And it's all Google's goddamn fault. They threw up in the pool, and we're all swimming in it. I mean, the internet was supposed to be the greatest source of information in the history of humankind. But Google's monopoly has created a world in which real sites that employ real journalists, real reviewers, and real experts

shut down every day because they can't compete with the bullsh** content farms that Google's algorithm promotes instead. And now that so-called artificial intelligence is about to flood the internet with even more dumbass spam, what is Google doing? They're jamming AI into the fucking search engine itself. So now, instead of just serving you the barf, Google's AI is going to ingest the barf for you, then barf it back at you in hopes that you'll swallow it down like some kind of vomit or a boris. I mean, what the fuck happened to Don't Be Evil? Did they just take that sign off the wall?

Oh, yeah, they did. And then they shot that dude in the head. Google built its fortune on the forest of links, the deep structure of an internet created by humans. But after they won, they used their money and power to destroy that forest and make sure nothing else could ever grow in its place. And nothing is more evil than that.

Now, I know that all sounds pretty bleak, but there is a way to fix it. And in fact, the phrase, don't be evil, is itself a reference to the last tech monopoly that we needed to cut down to size. Microsoft. See, back in the 90s, Microsoft was a ruthless giant

that sought to dominate the computer industry and the internet itself. Everyone hated them. They were using their monopoly over the operating system, Windows, to gain an unfair advantage over the internet, bundling their crappy web browser Internet Explorer as the default so that competitors couldn't break into the market. And the fear was that if Microsoft was allowed to establish monopoly control over the software we use to connect to the web,

they'd be able to kill competition across the entire internet. Microsoft even had internal conversations in which they discussed directing users to Microsoft's search site if they typed in Google.com. Well, you know what happened next? The federal government sued them for violating antitrust law. And even though that case was eventually settled, just the threat of federal enforcement actually caused Microsoft to change their business practices. Microsoft's own lawyers admitted that the constant scrutiny and being in the newspaper all the time

actually made them behave differently because no one wanted to test the regulators anymore. Microsoft stopped trying to monopolize the internet, giving new startups like Google the space they needed to grow and flourish. That's right, Google, the biggest of all big tech companies, only exists because the government was willing to step in and kick some big tech ass. This is why we need antitrust enforcement.

If monopolistic companies are allowed to strangle their competitors in the crib, like Microsoft used to do and like Google does today, they'll never be able to grow up into those energetic, idealistic teenagers that change the world. So you know what? If we wanna fix this, our government needs to get off of its ass,

enforce our antitrust laws, and start punishing the assholes who... Oh, never mind. I'm seeing that the Department of Justice actually sued Google months ago. Sorry, force of habit. I'm just not used to the government like doing its job ever. Hope they win. And you should too. Because you know what?

There's tech pundits out there who will try to tell you that this is government overreach, that the government shouldn't meddle in big tech. And that's a lie that we all need to start pushing back on. Because if we don't, well, we better all start learning to boil an egg in barf. Ah! Ah! Ah!

Thank you so much for watching, and a special thanks to everybody who supports this channel at the $15 a month level on Patreon. Here are the names of all the wonderful people who do that. If you wanna join them, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover to join our community. We'd love to have you. See you there. And see you very soon with the next video.

That was a hate gum podcast.