Google has seriously leaned into AI enshittification lately

KETTLE Google I/O has ostensibly been an AI show for a few years running, but this year's announcements have taken the cake, which Google seems all to happy to let its users eat as it reshapes the web. On this week's episode of The Kettle, host Brandon Vigliarolo is joined by El Reg senior reporter Tom Claburn and open source reporter Liam Proven to discuss how Google's bevy of AI announcements, and declaration that we're entering the era of AI search, might not play well with customers. From an enlarged AI mode, to AI ads stuffed into AI answers, and pushing AI devs onto closed-source tools after shuttering open-source ones, Google is leaning hard into its version of the future of the internet no matter what users might think, and we wonder whether that might finally crack Google's stranglehold on the web. You can listen to The Kettle here, as well as on Spotify and Apple Music, or read the transcript of the latest episode below. It's been lightly edited for clarity. Brandon (00:04) Welcome back to another episode of The Register's Kettle Podcast. I'm your host Brandon Vigliarolo, and you've likely heard about this week's topic if you've paid any attention to the internet in the past week. Google said at its annual I/O event that it's reinventing search for the AI era. But from an outsider perspective, it seems a lot more like Google's leaning into AI as an excuse to reshape the web and Gemini's image, regardless of how that might affect access to the open web. Unpredictably, there are a lot of people calling foul over that and other recent AI moves made by Google. With me to discuss this is El Reg Senior Reporter Tom Claburn. And joining us for the first time on this iteration of the kettle is our open source guru Liam Proven. Thanks to both of you for being here. Thomas Claburn (00:45) Thanks. Liam Proven (00:46) Thank you. Brandon (00:46) So hey, Google's AI-ification of search was the big news to come out of I/O this week. Tom, you tuned into the keynote and wrote about this. So what exactly did Google say it's going to do and why is everyone so up in arms over this? Thomas Claburn (01:01) I mean, it's just more encroachment of AI into search and they, you know, they have their AI Overviews, which are the little summaries that they put up on top of search results. And then they also have separate thing that's very similarly named, but different called AI Mode, which is available through a tab and you click on it that's sort of a deeper version of AI, I think it ties into some, Google knowledge graph and it has sort of a broader thing, but you often get similar results, but basically they're going to be showing more of the AI Overviews and, it's not always clear when these happen, but basically for longer queries, it's more likely to be handed off to an AI model. Brandon (01:44) Mm-hmm. Thomas Claburn (01:45) And it's a problem for a lot of people because people's relationship with Google began with: you go to Google, you find stuff, and then you leave. And increasingly, it's you go to Google and you're stuck there like it's a tar pit. And you're just trying to figure out where did they get this information? And they'll put up a summary. And of course, they have the disclaimer, well, you know, maybe it's not accurate. You'll have to check on that. How are you going to check on it? I'll go to the links that we didn't show you. It's, you know, people I think are a little bit – I mean, part of it is just people don't like change, but part of it is just AI really is not the right answer for a lot of things, at least in my opinion. I think there are certain kinds of queries that it can be useful for. And I think that largely though, if people are going to look for documents, they need to be able to find reputable sites and be able to make trust decisions. And a lot of that information is getting obscured or put into little teeny citation chips that you have to click on to figure out, where is this information coming from? Brandon (02:49) Yeah, and sometimes when you click on one site, it'll give you four or five links and be like, well, here's the sources we use to compile this information. Like a lot of times, I'll admit, I do use the AI Overviews every once in a while when they pop up, especially for simple questions like on my smartphone or something. But they'll give you, cite their sources and you click on them. But sometimes that's just as big a pain in the butt as assuming that the AI Overview is just correct. I'd much rather just have a list of blue links, which Google did clarify to me and to Avram, our US editor, earlier this week, that traditional search engine result pages are not going away. Thomas Claburn (03:24) Yeah, they're not going away. They're just going to get buried under more AI. You have to work harder to find them. And then there was some other interesting stuff too, where their Gemini Spark, which is their agent... in the Gemini app, they're also going to be pushing these long-running AI tasks that you'll be able to do, and they're eventually going hook it up to the regular Google account or search or whatever. So you can basically run a chron job with, you know, an AI model essentially, to go do things for you. And I think that the think they talk about it for is shopping. It's gonna, of course, plan your travel itinerary and do stuff for you in the background, and somehow you're gonna be happy with results. It's not clear how you're gonna pay for that because someone has to run this stuff, maybe this all comes out of the hide of advertisers who are gonna sort of get shoveled into these results, who knows? Brandon (04:20) Right, and that's actually kind of segues really well into one of the stories that I wrote about I/O this week, and that was Google's new AI advertisements that they're kind of injecting in. They... I see we're doing audio, but I see Liam on the other side of the camera just putting his hand in his hands, you know, my God. We talk about where the cash is going to come from from this, and it's obviously going to come from this, right? There were two particular kinds of AI advertisements that Google said they were going to add soon to AI mode. There were some ads that were going to be basically in line. If you ask a query, you get your responses back from the AI. In that list of results is going to be ads. And Google said they're going to be at the bottom of the list, but they're still going to be presented in line. And I think there might be some indicator about them being a sponsored element of the post, but they're still putting them in line with results that are ostensibly grabbed from the web and are supposed to be factual. The other one that I found a little more concerning personally was conversational discovery ads. So basically the way Google described this is, you ask a complicated question and it will use Gemini to figure out what products you need to solve your problems. And the example they gave was, oh well, your house smells kind of musty and you want to make it smell more like a spa. Well, I feel like if I were to go onto Google right now and type in, my house smells musty and I don't want it to. Some of the first things you might get are things like, put some baking soda in some water, make a 50-50 mixture of vinegar and water, and you can deodorize and clean for pennies on the dollar. But Google sees this as a way to inject products in front of you.... I was picturing going in there and asking for tips on cleaning my house and deodorizing it and getting a whole bunch of ads for $20 reed diffusers, expensive plug-in units. Liam Proven (05:55) Mm-hmm. Brandon (06:08) That's how I see this, right? And I don't know if that's entirely correct, but Google's not doing a lot to kind of say that that's not the case. Liam Proven (06:17) I feel like the great prophet Cory Doctorow kind of nailed this a couple of years ago now with this word, enshittification. I was baffled when Google announced that it was going to start deliberately degrading search results in the interest of keeping people on the page and on the site longer. And it feels like they're not leaning in, they dived off the board and jumping in, pinch the nose and throw yourself in. I do not see how this is going to pay long term, but, on the one hand maybe there's some genius there with playing playing four-dimensional chess, maybe they're just... they've drunk the Kool-Aid and cannot imagine anything else now Brandon (07:05) Yeah, it just feels like an attempt. I mean, it was the same thing with Google saying that they were introducing, I think, some commerce protocols earlier this year that were designed to basically allow Gemini to check out for you. So you don't even need to go to a company's website to buy a product now. You can do it all right through Gemini. So that, again, that's starving a company of web views so that Google can make a few more cents on a transaction. Thomas Claburn (07:28) Yeah. Brandon (07:29) And I don't see how this is any different, right? It's injecting more ads, getting more things in front of you, and burying actual web results below this in the hopes that you never get to that point. Thomas Claburn (07:36) And the one thing it's going to incentivize is that everyone who actually wants to use an AI model is going to think, how can I use this to block ads? How can I use it to get this stuff out of my Google search results and get something that's closer to whatever, some kind of neutral or less commercial standard? At least if you put up with it, if you don't just turn it off entirely and think, I'm going to figure out – I'm going to go back to Yahoo and get a list of curated sites and just stay there. Brandon (08:06) I think about it sometimes in terms of, you know, well, Google Search was never giving me an objective view of what's on the internet, right? It's always filtered through Google's algorithm or whoever's. But I feel like there's a difference between filtering it through an algorithm and making me do the legwork and just assuming that whatever Gemini is serving to me is going to be exactly what I need because Google thinks that's what I need. Liam Proven (08:31) Maybe you take a, what's the expression, a 30,000 foot view, but I think we've got to go a lot higher and take a low earth orbit view. This is going to be very good news for the wider software community as it drives improvements in ad blocking technology, Google-free browsers, Google-free search engines, Google-free anything, please, anything that can get this stuff out of our face. Thomas Claburn (08:56) Europe is already partway there with the sort digital sovereignty stuff. I mean, this is just another sort of data point in the rationale for moving. perhaps we'll finally see some innovation where Google kills its own search business. And it's not like search was doing so well anyway. Even before the AI boom, was a lot of complaints that there were just lacks about policing, spam farms and things like that. There was a lot of lifting you had to do even just as a 10 blue links user to sort through the junk. And if they really cared about delivering quality editorial to people, the web would look a lot different. Brandon (09:35) You just wrote an op-ed, Tom, that kind of covers some of that, right? You asked Google's own AIs why Google search results were getting worse, and it pretty much was like, yeah, hey, they are. Mea culpa here, you know, it was... Thomas Claburn (09:39) Right. It's unfair, but it's also, kind of telling that this is what we've come to where, we're going to source stuff off of a couple of Reddit opinions and blogs. And then, when you ask it, when you frame it in a nice way, "why is Google search great?" It goes to Google's own blog posts to source that. I guess that works for some people, but it's really just a poisonous media ecosystem. I who wants to even be a part of that? I mean, I think all of t

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