Also, I'm pretty sure Microsoft and Meta hate me as well. Honestly, if every major tech company dislikes me at this point, I'm starting to suspect it's a 'me' problem.
I always find titles like “Google Hates You” a bit weird. People usually argue that employees are not personally responsible for bad company decisions, that criticism should be aimed at the corporation itself, not at random engineers or designers working there. But then we turn around and assign human emotions to the corporation anyway.
A company cannot literally “hate” anyone. It has no feelings, intentions, or consciousness. So who exactly is supposed to hate you here? The CEO? The executives? The leadership team? Every single employee at Google? And who is “you,” exactly? Billions of users spread across the planet?
I get the point the title is trying to make, but it feels more accurate to say that Google optimizes for incentives that are often misaligned with users, not that it emotionally despises them.
While I sympathise and it's a well written article, writers engaging in SEO and clickbait (as they admitted) to drive traffic are just as responsible for the death of the internet. They're bemoaning the loss of traffic but that traffic may have already been stolen from a more appropriate search result that didn't have a team working on SEO.
Also, the irony isn't lost on me that I had a cookie dialogue fill 80% of the screen and this little snippet:
> Early Google didn’t even have ads; it was so clean and pure.
> Advertisement
> Article continues below this ad
They don't just want your eyeballs they want your data. They want to track you and give that data to advertisers.
Like I said I do sympathise and maybe it's a necessary evil, but in my opinion all of these sites are just a less successful side of the same coin.
i guess i don't blame a writer who's job is threatened by this technology to write a piece like this. but the perspective is ultimately one where they are complaining about how it affects them, without regard to the end user.
it's the same as toll booth operators complaining about fastpass
As a user I hate google's approach as well, not because of job related reasons, but the functionality keeps changing to no increased value to me. I don't see how you the end user would have a different opinion unless you did not use google before say 2016.
Yes, the churn they bring to products that were complete over a decade ago is ridiculous. So much change for change’s sake (or more likely in pursuit of promotions internally) and so little thought to quality, what makes a product good, and what would make users happy.
They try to offer some other perspectives as well:
> This isn’t just a me problem. You don’t have to be a writer to have your livelihood be dependent upon Google search results. Small-business owners need Google to reach potential new customers. Students, many of them working on school-issued Chromebooks made by Google, need it to research term papers and study for final exams. In its earliest form, Google dot-com was the perfect utility for all of these people and millions more.
But I agree with you (despite being predisposed to agreeing with the author) that the invective doesn't quite land because they don't do quite enough work to ensure we're on their side in understanding how we might be affected.
I'll just take this space to note that folks that feel similarly to the author should try Kagi, as they let you choose how much AI you want rather than forcing a chat interface onto you or directing you away from links.
> i guess i don't blame a writer who's job is threatened by this technology to write a piece like this
> it's the same as toll booth operators complaining about fastpass
I think your analogy would work better if toll booth operators built the roads, the cars, the toll booths themselves, and then were all replaced by fastpass.
sure, there is some bitching about how the ad funded web-site-news business model is getting distrupted. I'm not completely heartbroken about that.
but much of the article describes how Google is trying to deploy their final solution for intermediation. their attempts to 'googlify' things like grocery shopping and job searching pretty much failed. but now, they are promoting a model where, finally, all information they present has been googlified. they are not a phone book or card catalog, but now the entire library. there aren't original sources any more, just what Google has decided to tell you about something.
It's important for everyone to have their own brand. Matt Levine won't be as impacted by this as this writer. You've got to focus on making it easy to find your content and having it delivered to my email is about as convenient as it gets.
It is probably worth noting Drew very much does have his own brand as a co-founder of Defector.com. While not as popular as Levine’s money stuff, Defector.com survives on user subscriptions alone and a lot of URL requests are direct. Drew freelances for SFGate, and with that said I think he’s writing from the perspective of his “freelancer hat” and lamenting the impact “Google Zero” will have on websites around the world dependent on Google’s traffic.
I find it pretty funny, that in an article decrying goggle's abusive behavior, the screenshot they link (which obviously needs to be a video) is a link to a goggle owned property:
You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower.
>Many people don’t; they’ll get a top-line answer from AI and deem it not worth the trouble to click or scroll any further.
sparing the user the usual experience of visiting some random ad-riddled clickbait mill and trying to extract useful information from ten paragraphs of SEO diarrhea.
>Sites like SFGATE need traffic to survive, and writers like me need those sites to stay alive if we hope to remain gainfully employed by them.
Maybe the computer world has been a distributed nightmare of mortgage-driven development for decades now for everyone. Maybe now that the people who were on the inside are not getting that sweet and foolish feeling of being on the inside while everyone else is on the outside, they start to see it's really a monstrous pseudo-intellectual stupidity closer to pop entertainment than science.
Visiting websites as a human is sooo 2025. We are entering a world where only bots actually fetch primary web content any more. Our gatekeeper overlords will filter, curate, and remix everything for us. This is the next step in the machines taking over.
>Google’s mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Its mission is not to give traffic to websites. If websites are a bad way for users to get information due to endless rambling or obnoxious ads then don't be surprised if that information is made more accessible. It's like if Google Maps didn't have things like business hours hosted within Maps instead of requiring the user to do extra work and find it on the business's website.
Also, I'm pretty sure Microsoft and Meta hate me as well. Honestly, if every major tech company dislikes me at this point, I'm starting to suspect it's a 'me' problem.
I always find titles like “Google Hates You” a bit weird. People usually argue that employees are not personally responsible for bad company decisions, that criticism should be aimed at the corporation itself, not at random engineers or designers working there. But then we turn around and assign human emotions to the corporation anyway.
A company cannot literally “hate” anyone. It has no feelings, intentions, or consciousness. So who exactly is supposed to hate you here? The CEO? The executives? The leadership team? Every single employee at Google? And who is “you,” exactly? Billions of users spread across the planet?
I get the point the title is trying to make, but it feels more accurate to say that Google optimizes for incentives that are often misaligned with users, not that it emotionally despises them.
[dead]
They hate people they can't control
> Instead of giving you precisely what you want, a Google search in 2026 is more likely to give you only what you don’t want.
The youngest Google Search seems like it has a lot in common with the next-youngest Google Search.
While I sympathise and it's a well written article, writers engaging in SEO and clickbait (as they admitted) to drive traffic are just as responsible for the death of the internet. They're bemoaning the loss of traffic but that traffic may have already been stolen from a more appropriate search result that didn't have a team working on SEO.
Also, the irony isn't lost on me that I had a cookie dialogue fill 80% of the screen and this little snippet:
> Early Google didn’t even have ads; it was so clean and pure.
> Advertisement > Article continues below this ad
They don't just want your eyeballs they want your data. They want to track you and give that data to advertisers.
Like I said I do sympathise and maybe it's a necessary evil, but in my opinion all of these sites are just a less successful side of the same coin.
[flagged]
Hate Google back. It works for me.
i guess i don't blame a writer who's job is threatened by this technology to write a piece like this. but the perspective is ultimately one where they are complaining about how it affects them, without regard to the end user.
it's the same as toll booth operators complaining about fastpass
As a user I hate google's approach as well, not because of job related reasons, but the functionality keeps changing to no increased value to me. I don't see how you the end user would have a different opinion unless you did not use google before say 2016.
Yes, the churn they bring to products that were complete over a decade ago is ridiculous. So much change for change’s sake (or more likely in pursuit of promotions internally) and so little thought to quality, what makes a product good, and what would make users happy.
They try to offer some other perspectives as well:
> This isn’t just a me problem. You don’t have to be a writer to have your livelihood be dependent upon Google search results. Small-business owners need Google to reach potential new customers. Students, many of them working on school-issued Chromebooks made by Google, need it to research term papers and study for final exams. In its earliest form, Google dot-com was the perfect utility for all of these people and millions more.
But I agree with you (despite being predisposed to agreeing with the author) that the invective doesn't quite land because they don't do quite enough work to ensure we're on their side in understanding how we might be affected.
I'll just take this space to note that folks that feel similarly to the author should try Kagi, as they let you choose how much AI you want rather than forcing a chat interface onto you or directing you away from links.
> i guess i don't blame a writer who's job is threatened by this technology to write a piece like this
> it's the same as toll booth operators complaining about fastpass
I think your analogy would work better if toll booth operators built the roads, the cars, the toll booths themselves, and then were all replaced by fastpass.
sure, there is some bitching about how the ad funded web-site-news business model is getting distrupted. I'm not completely heartbroken about that.
but much of the article describes how Google is trying to deploy their final solution for intermediation. their attempts to 'googlify' things like grocery shopping and job searching pretty much failed. but now, they are promoting a model where, finally, all information they present has been googlified. they are not a phone book or card catalog, but now the entire library. there aren't original sources any more, just what Google has decided to tell you about something.
It's important for everyone to have their own brand. Matt Levine won't be as impacted by this as this writer. You've got to focus on making it easy to find your content and having it delivered to my email is about as convenient as it gets.
It is probably worth noting Drew very much does have his own brand as a co-founder of Defector.com. While not as popular as Levine’s money stuff, Defector.com survives on user subscriptions alone and a lot of URL requests are direct. Drew freelances for SFGate, and with that said I think he’s writing from the perspective of his “freelancer hat” and lamenting the impact “Google Zero” will have on websites around the world dependent on Google’s traffic.
I find it pretty funny, that in an article decrying goggle's abusive behavior, the screenshot they link (which obviously needs to be a video) is a link to a goggle owned property:
> Look at this horrible s—t. Look at it!
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6EBMG8OEBI
No, I'm not going to look at it, and neither should you...
You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower.
Google Search has been awful for the last couple of years. Good riddance to SEO.
you wish ... it's just another kind of hidden PR called LLM poisoning and all the previous SEO grifters offer that now instead.
>Many people don’t; they’ll get a top-line answer from AI and deem it not worth the trouble to click or scroll any further.
sparing the user the usual experience of visiting some random ad-riddled clickbait mill and trying to extract useful information from ten paragraphs of SEO diarrhea.
>Sites like SFGATE need traffic to survive, and writers like me need those sites to stay alive if we hope to remain gainfully employed by them.
~~learn to code~~ (oops, too late, lol).
Don't be evil. Drop the don't; it's cleaner.
They just inserted an exclamation mark after the first word.
Breaking news from 2005
when the officially retired don't be evil ?
Maybe the computer world has been a distributed nightmare of mortgage-driven development for decades now for everyone. Maybe now that the people who were on the inside are not getting that sweet and foolish feeling of being on the inside while everyone else is on the outside, they start to see it's really a monstrous pseudo-intellectual stupidity closer to pop entertainment than science.
Visiting websites as a human is sooo 2025. We are entering a world where only bots actually fetch primary web content any more. Our gatekeeper overlords will filter, curate, and remix everything for us. This is the next step in the machines taking over.
Much of the same discussions:
Google changes its search box
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197370
Google Declaring War on the Web
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214449
DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296649
As a reminder the mission of Google is:
>Google’s mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Its mission is not to give traffic to websites. If websites are a bad way for users to get information due to endless rambling or obnoxious ads then don't be surprised if that information is made more accessible. It's like if Google Maps didn't have things like business hours hosted within Maps instead of requiring the user to do extra work and find it on the business's website.
They didn’t fix that when they were removing “don’t be evil”? Interesting oversight.
They didn't remove don't be evil.
[dead]
[flagged]