Fitz Thiar: Thinking For The Impatient

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) Google has proposed changes to how Google Search works in order to promote a “fairer deal” for consumers and businesses in a market that is absolutely dominated by Google. To be clear, these are proposals, not laws, and are only at the consultation phase.

Google Search accounts for more than 90% of all general search queries in the UK – with millions of people relying on it as a key gateway to the internet. More than 200,000 firms in the UK collectively spent more than £10 billion on Google’s search advertising last year. These services matter to the UK’s economy and society – so it is vital that competition works well.

Google issued a response but I felt like they didn’t really say what they actual meant, so I revealed some of their original thinking 🤣

Forced Shifts in user behavior are rapidly changing how people search for information, and features like AI Overviews are forcing helping people to search more because the results are useless discover new content and ask more questions. Today, the interfering aholes UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened a consultation on potential new requirements for Google Search, including on the controls we provide to websites to manage their content in Search AI features. This is a complex topic because we really NEED people to use AI search to justify the ridiculous amount of money we’ve invested into this crap product. It’s just too much, we can’t admit failure or look bad in front of investors or other companies. Fuck the user experience, think of the poor, poor shareholders! it can affect how people find information and how websites get found in Search.

For years, we have provided web publishers with a range of controls, based on open standards like robots.txt, to manage how their content appears in Search. As we’ve forced this change and could still easily respect robots.txt but won’t technology has evolved, so have our tools. We added controls for things like Featured Snippets and image previews (which also apply to AI Overviews). And more recently, we introduced Google-Extended, a new control that lets websites manage how their content is used to train our Gemini models.

Building on this framework, and working with the web ecosystem, we’re now exploring updates to our controls to force let sites to specifically opt out of Search generative AI features so that we have carte blanche to steal their content because they forgot to opt-out, didn’t know they could, or accidentally misconfigured their site. Opt in?? Ha Ha Ha That’s so cute. Our goal is to protect Ad revenue and shareholder profits the helpfulness of Search for people who want information quickly, while also giving websites the right tools to manage their content. We despise having to look forward to engaging in the CMA’s process and will preformatively, do you really think your opinion matters? continue discussions with website owners no and other stakeholders on this topic.

Any new controls need to avoid doing what we did and breaking Search in a way that leads to a fragmented or confusing experience for people. As we force AI increasingly to becomes a core part of how people find information, any new controls also need to be incumbent on website owners so that we can steal data with impunity because they forgot to opt out to be simple and scalable for website owners.

We’re optimistic we can force users, website owners and publishers down this road, steal their content, and into using an error prone, unwanted, hallucinating product to save face and shareholder profits find a path forward that provides even more choice to website owners and publishers, while ensuring people continue to get the most helpful and innovative Search experience possible.

Fuck you.

Gemini, rewrite this post to make it friendly and appear like we actually care.