People have gotten used to the idea that Google’s metrics are the alpha and omega of everything related to web traffic. This is an institutional lie accepted after years of a monopoly on search. Google’s search algorithms serve one purpose. To optimize ad revenue for Google. Actual traffic results may vary, but our previous hosting company based its billing model on actual visits and the bandwidth required.
The result was that our real traffic was about two to four times what Google declared the word of the Alphabet gods and still is.
Google has also used its prominence for other forms of evil. Copyright holders have been after it for decades as it scoops up content and makes it available, which is an interesting contrast to what happens on YouTube if you record at an event and it hears music in the background that you don’t have permission to “use.”
The latest outrage, as everyone argues over the output of AI, which is currently but not entirely an amalgam of everyone else’s work (we have a nice series on this here if you’re interested), is a test project. An experiment, says Google.
Building on the foundation of AI Overviews, which summarize publishers’ content into brief snippets, the search engine has now begun testing a new feature in which it changes the headlines of published articles themselves.
The response?
Every media executive agreed: The original sin of this particular experiment was a lack of communication, consent, or even basic notification.
Even a charitable interpretation of the trial, premised on the idea that Google is optimizing these headlines to better serve its users and publisher partners, still would not excuse a lack of cooperation, according to one of the executives. The oversight is particularly glaring given that the changes made are to the editorial content itself.
“This is another overreach by Google taking liberties with content without permission,” one media executive told ADWEEK. “It is hard to understand why Google feels they have the right to do this.”
Google as Skynet is not a difficult thing to imagine, especially in a world run by the people who ran the Biden Administration. Ideologically aligned. Militant abuse of police powers without any regard for the rights enumerated or otherwise. The left loves a King if he uses force not just to advance shared beliefs, but to require that everyone share them or keep quiet.
Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and China. Places where you can get things done, like suppress speech, force your will upon people, jail political opponents without due process, all things the Bidenistas did, by the way, long before the same people discovered how outraged we should be about it if it happens to illegal criminal aliens or anyone arrested or charged with things they charged Trump with.
Google is the perfect progressive oligarch. It deliberately controls what you see when you search, and now it is considering how to improve the headlines of that content. I can only assume the actual content might be next. The AI would be its Winston Smith, and Publishers could be as surprised as journalists were when Obama spied on them. It was easy. Domestic anti-terrorism strategy. Google would be more than happy to help some future Administration use AI to troll everything everywhere – a plan already in motion in the EU, where the unelected parliament of petty despots is planning to troll your texts, calls, and everything else, for the good of public safety.
It’s how you end up with Hitler, or the supposed organ vans in China. People disappearing in the night, and no one dares question why, so they won’t be next. Systemic cultural suppression of speech and manipulation of thought.
Google would love that, and so would the proglodytes as long as it answered to them. They could control more than speech. They could control online reality, which, in the increasingly connected world, is maddeningly the same as the real world to far too many people.
Trump’s DOJ, (btw) is actively suing Google for “antitrust violations, specifically targeting its monopolization of the search engine and digital advertising markets.” Is there enough time to prove the case or break it up before an actual king sits in the Oval Office?
