Introducing "Understood: Who Broke Internet"

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Introducing 'Understood: Who Broke Internet'"

Podcast Information

• Title: Click Here
• Host/Author: Recorded Future News
• Episode: Introducing "Understood: Who Broke Internet"
• Release Date: July 15, 2025
• Description: Click Here delves into true stories about the people shaping our digital landscape. Hosted by former NPR investigations correspondent Dina Temple-Raston, the podcast explores topics like ransomware, hackers, and cybersecurity without heavy technical jargon.

---

Introduction to the Episode

In this special episode, Dina Temple-Raston introduces a collaboration with the CBC podcast "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" The episode nostalgically reflects on the early, more innocent days of the internet, contrasting it with today’s complex and often problematic digital environment filled with misinformation, deepfakes, and persistent cyber threats.

The Google Code Yellow Incident

The episode begins by recounting an incident from February 5, 2019, at Google's headquarters where a "Code Yellow" was declared—a crisis signaling moderate severity requiring immediate attention.

• Key Figures:

  • Ben Gomes (00:02): Head of Search at Google, faced with the Code Yellow.
  • Prabhagar Raghavan (02:19): Google's Head of Ads, driving the crisis due to declining search queries impacting ad revenue.
  • Jerry Dishler (28:16): Vice President of Advertising, pushing for changes to increase queries and, consequently, ad revenue.

• Notable Quote:

  "Fix this. Get more queries happening." — Prabhagar Raghavan (02:19)

Despite Google's dominance with a 90% market share, the company struggled to maintain and grow search queries, directly affecting its primary revenue stream from advertisements. Internal tensions surfaced as Ben Gomes and his team resisted measures that would degrade the search experience to boost ad views.

Inshittification of the Internet

Cory Doctorow introduces the term "inshittification," a neologism describing the gradual decline in the quality of digital platforms driven by business interests.

• Notable Quotes:

  "It's not just Google search, it's happening to the entire Internet." — Cory Doctorow (05:58)

  "Every big tech company is changing in front of our very eyes. Amazon sucks right now. Uber sucks right now. Netflix sucks. Facebook sucks." — Ed Zitron (06:12)

The conversation highlights how platforms initially designed to empower users have become profit-driven entities that compromise user experience. This transformation involves three stages:

1. Good to Bad: Platforms become user-friendly but find ways to lock users in.
2. Benefitting Business: Platforms prioritize the interests of business customers over users.
3. Value Shift: Ultimate focus shifts to benefiting investors and executives, leaving users and businesses disadvantaged.

Historical Perspective on the Internet’s Evolution

The episode provides a historical overview of the internet's early days, emphasizing its initial promise of democratization and open communication.

• Key Points:

  • Early Internet (1950s-1990s): Visionaries saw computers as tools for communication, leading to the creation of interconnected networks like Usenet.
  • Google’s Emergence: Founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google revolutionized search with the PageRank algorithm, offering vastly improved search results compared to predecessors.

• Notable Quote:

  "When I first saw the Google search engine, my mind was blown." — Emmanuel Goldstein (18:25)

Google initially thrived on the motto "Don't be evil," focusing on delivering quality search results without heavy reliance on advertisements. However, the introduction of AdWords in 2000 marked a pivotal shift towards monetization through ads, altering the fundamental nature of search results.

The Shift to Ad-Driven Search

The introduction of AdWords transformed Google’s business model by integrating advertisements directly into search results.

• Impact:

  • Early AdWords (26:12): Ads appeared in a prominent colored bar alongside organic search results, benefiting users, advertisers, and Google alike.
  • Post-Code Yellow Changes (27:19): Subsequent modifications blurred the distinction between ads and organic results, leading to a decline in search quality and user trust.

• Notable Quote:

  "They had to make money. So then they figured, well, maybe there's a way to do ads that would be terrible." — Emmanuel Goldstein (25:23)

Despite initial success, these changes prioritized ad revenue over user experience, resulting in poorer search quality and increased frustration among users.

Consequences of Inshittification

By 2025, the cumulative effect of these shifts has severely degraded the functionality and reliability of Google Search.

• Real-World Implications:

  • Users experience irrelevant and spammy search results.
  • Authentic queries yield predominantly ads or broken links instead of useful information.
  • Trust in Google's search capabilities has significantly diminished.

• Notable Quote:

  "What is the point of a search engine that can't retrieve pages on major websites containing the exact phrase you searched for?" — Cory Doctorow (31:22)

Defining and Understanding Inshittification

The episode delves deeper into the concept of inshittification, explaining its three-stage process and its pervasive impact on digital platforms.

• Stages of Inshittification:

  1. Lock-In: Platforms become indispensable, making it difficult for users to leave.
  2. Business Prioritization: User experience is compromised to satisfy business clients.
  3. Value Extraction: Platforms extract maximum value for investors and executives, often at the expense of users and businesses.

• Notable Quote:

  "Enshitification describes the widespread decay of the platforms we all rely on for so much. It's a three-stage process..." — Cory Doctorow (36:29)

Final Reflections and Accountability

The episode concludes by questioning the broader systemic issues that allow such degradation to occur, emphasizing the role of policymakers and business decisions in shaping the internet's trajectory.

• Key Insights:

  • The decline is not solely due to malicious intent by tech CEOs but also stems from policy choices that prioritize profit over user welfare.
  • Replacing leadership alone won’t reverse the trend; comprehensive policy reforms are necessary to reclaim the internet’s democratic ideals.

• Notable Quote:

  "The people inshitting our tech are downstream of other people, policymakers whose choices created the fecund and shitagenic environment..." — Cory Doctorow (38:36)

---

Conclusion "Introducing 'Understood: Who Broke Internet'" offers a critical examination of how business imperatives and policy decisions have systematically eroded the quality and integrity of the internet. Through the lens of Google’s transformation, the episode highlights the broader phenomenon of inshittification, urging listeners to consider the need for collective action to restore the internet’s foundational principles.

---

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Prabhagar Raghavan: "Fix this. Get more queries happening." (02:19)
• Cory Doctorow: "It's not just Google search, it's happening to the entire Internet." (05:58)
• Ed Zitron: "Every big tech company is changing in front of our very eyes." (06:12)
• Emmanuel Goldstein: "When I first saw the Google search engine, my mind was blown." (18:25)
• Emmanuel Goldstein: "They had to make money. So then they figured, well, maybe there's a way to do ads that would be terrible." (25:23)
• Cory Doctorow: "What is the point of a search engine that can't retrieve pages on major websites containing the exact phrase you searched for?" (31:22)
• Cory Doctorow: "Enshitification describes the widespread decay of the platforms we all rely on for so much. It's a three-stage process..." (36:29)
• Cory Doctorow: "The people inshitting our tech are downstream of other people, policymakers whose choices created the fecund and shitagenic environment..." (38:36)

Transcript

[Dena Temple Raston]

From Recorded Future News and prx, this is Click Here. Hi, it's Dena. We have something a little different for you this week. It's an episode from our friends over at the cbc. They have a podcast we think you'll love called Understood. Who broke the Internet? Remember when the Internet felt fun? Back when we were building geocity pages about cats and trying to come up with the perfect away message on AOL Instant Messenger? These days, going online is a bit more complicated, with its barrage of misinformation, deepfakes, and hackers just lying in wait. It didn't have to be this way. On this season of Understood, host Cory Doctrow traces how we got here. He looks at the key moments and big tech's landmark calls to understand why the modern Internet is, well, so terrible. And he starts with something that was once considered revolutionary. Google search. Take a listen.

[Cory Doctorow]

It's February 5, 2019, and at the Googleplex, that's Google's Silicon Valley headquarters, a man named Ben Gomes is about to get some bad news.

[Ed Zitron]

He received emails saying, hey, look, we've got a code Yellow. Code Yellow is a crisis of moderate severity, and they generally mean all hands on deck to fix this.

[Cory Doctorow]

This is Ed Zitron. He's a tech journalist who covered this Code Yellow situation. The term code Y come from a green, yellow, red traffic light metaphor. Rather, it's because of a yellow tank top that a former VP of engineering used to crack out to rally the troops in emergencies like the one Ben Gomes had just been emailed about.

[Ed Zitron]

Hey, look, we've got a code yellow for search revenue because we have a steady weakness in the daily numbers due to queries.

[Cory Doctorow]

Google calls your searches queries. When you query Google, it spits out a list of websites that Google promises will help you find whatever you're looking for. But also you get ads. Those ads are Google's biggest source of revenue. And the mastermind behind this Code Yellow was Google's head of ads, Prabhagar Ragavan. And Prabhagar's big emergency search query growth.

[Ed Zitron]

Was significantly behind Forecast.

[Cory Doctorow]

Not enough searches are happening, which means not enough ads being seen, which means not enough money is being made. This is why Ben gets tagged in.

[Ed Zitron]

He was a search engineer that just rose to becoming head of search.

[Cory Doctorow]

The message from the ads team to the search team is, fix this. Get more queries happening. Of course, Google already had plenty of queries at that moment. When the Code Yellow went out in 2019, Google was the most used search engine in the world. In the history of the world, it had a market share of about 90%. If you were looking something up, chances are you were looking it up on Google. And that remaining sliver of people who weren't using Google, they were making a conscious choice not to use it. They were like Google vegans. So getting more people searching, yeah, that was going to be a tough one.

[Ed Zitron]

So several emails then bounced back and forth between Ben Gones and some of the internal people at Search and Discovery.

[Cory Doctorow]

Now Google is very hush hush about the inner workings of their search algorithm and any changes they make to it. But something must have made the bosses happy because the next thing you know, that Code Yellow was over and there.

[Ed Zitron]

Would be a big thread where people going back and forth saying, thank you, we've all done a great job. And then Ben Gomes said, well, good work everyone.

[Cory Doctorow]

Okay, so now it's done, right? Problem solved. Nope. Ben gets an email from Prabhagar saying.

[Ed Zitron]

No, you didn't fix this. Despite all these changes, queries were still not increasing.

[Cory Doctorow]

Okay, Ben's an engineer, he builds things, he doesn't sell ads. And he's uncomfortable with this whole thing. Soon he's responding to an email chain with the subject line getting ridiculous, saying.

[Ed Zitron]

That he believed that search was getting too close to the money. And that is a quote. And then he ended it saying he was concerned that growth is all that Google was thinking about.

[Cory Doctorow]

Because if they're going to increase queries fast enough to make ads happy, there's really just one option. In an email, one of Ben's colleagues lays it out like this. It wouldn't be about getting brand new users, but rather our existing users to search more. For Ben Gomes, this raised a problem which to paraphrase was this.

[Ed Zitron]

Hey, if we start optimizing to make people search more on Google search, wouldn't that mean that Google search has to get worse?

[Cory Doctorow]

Because if you make the search results worse, people will search again and again until they get a less bad result. And every new search means you see more ads more, which means Google makes more money. Ben and his team were feeling pressured to make Google search worse on purpose.

[Ed Zitron]

You read the emails and it's like time to mess up the experience to the detriment of the user. It's just crazy when you read how brazen they are. It really like it genuinely got to.

[Cory Doctorow]

Me, this whole thing. I call it inshittification. And it's not just Google search, it's happening to the entire Internet.

[Ed Zitron]

Amazon sucks right now. Uber sucks right now. Netflix sucks.

[Clive Thompson]

Facebook sucks.

[Ed Zitron]

Every big tech company is changing in front of our very eyes.

[Cory Doctorow]

Reels are shoved down your face 24. 7. You have emotion, you have violence.

[Stephen Levy]

You have images that can't be verified.

[Cory Doctorow]

Here since Canadians have been blocked from seeing news content on Instagram and Facebook. It feels like being back in grade school.

[Ed Zitron]

But you're only in grade school with the bullies.

[Cory Doctorow]

AI is basically going to destroy the.

[Ed Zitron]

Earth for a bunch of tech deep.

[Cory Doctorow]

Fake of the National Z and Hannah.

[Emmanuel Goldstein]

Mansing that seems to be selling cryptocurrency.

[Cory Doctorow]

Bro.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Things are getting progressively worse.

[Cory Doctorow]

Who is in charge of this?

[Ed Zitron]

Say with me, folks, insidification and shittification.

[Cory Doctorow]

It's not your imagination. The Internet didn't used to be like this. So what happened? How did it get so bad? And whose fault is it? I'm Cory Doctorow. I'm a science fiction writer, journalist and activist. For nearly a quarter century, I've been on the front lines of tech policy fights trying to save the Internet. Over the next four episodes, I'm taking you back to the moments when the Internet got in shittified. I'm naming the names of the people who did it and asking who will take the Internet back? On this season of Understood. Who broke the Internet?

[Dena Temple Raston]

You're listening to an episode of the CBC's who broke the Internet? We'll be right back. Click Here is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states from recorded future news. This is Click Here. Today we're sharing an episode from the CBC podcast who broke the Internet? Take a listen. Good evening. I'm Lori Brown. The amount of hype surrounding the Internet has reached epidemic proportions for those of.

[Ed Zitron]

Us without home computers.

[Cory Doctorow]

The Internet started with a handful of visionaries back in the 50s and 60s who thought that computers could be used not just for calculating stuff, but for communication. By the 1980s, there was a nascent Internet that crisscrossed the planet, linking up government agencies, universities and military contractors. Then, in the early 1990s, the Internet became available to the public. And who was there to usher in this new Internet age?

[Dena Temple Raston]

Joining me now is corporate Cory Doctorow.

[Cory Doctorow]

Cory Doctorow, I'm Cory Doctorow.

[Dena Temple Raston]

He's been working with computers since he was 7, and now he's an independent computer consultant and programmer.

[Cory Doctorow]

In 1990, four. I was 23 years old and had a job helping people figure out how to wire up their small businesses and connect them to the Internet. I suppose that's why I was asked to go on national television to explain this whole thing to the people of Canada.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Okay, Corey, let's get our feet wet. Show us how to surf the Net.

[Clive Thompson]

Okay. Well, when you're talking about playing around on the Internet, you're talking about one of two things. Playing with yourself, playing with other people.

[Cory Doctorow]

Uh huh.

[Clive Thompson]

Playing with yourself, more or less.

[Cory Doctorow]

Wow.

[Joey Ingrecia]

Where is this available?

[Cory Doctorow]

On the cbc. Oh, wow.

[Joey Ingrecia]

You guys have everything.

[Cory Doctorow]

I showed this clip to my friend Eric Corley. He's the publisher of 2600, an iconic hacker magazine he launched in 1984. Eric's better known by his hacker handle, Emmanuel Goldstein. Emmanuel was an early adopter of the Internet too, and he remembers what people were saying about it at the time.

[Joey Ingrecia]

This is the equivalent of fire, of, you know, the discovery of fire. It's not the printing press, it's not the car, it's fire.

[Cory Doctorow]

And Emmanuel was primed for it because in the 80s, he was involved in what was then the cutting edge of communications technology, telephone networks.

[Joey Ingrecia]

I think it was just for me, the fun of connecting to people in faraway places. Because as phone freaks, which is the telephone side of computer hackers, we would always be engaged in ways of making free phone calls. We would take great joy in connecting people together ourselves. We'd have these massive teleconferences and we'd call a random number in Australia and have a nice friendly chat with them and then connect them to a relative of theirs in the uk and everybody would have a great time.

[Cory Doctorow]

Emmanuel doesn't have any recordings of himself doing it, but this is Joey Ingrecia, AKA Joy Bubbles, a blind freaker who could whistle tones through the network to make free calls, like with his mouth. Let's see if I make it this time. This is really hard to do. It sounded like all the tones were present, so the phone should be ringing about now.

[Joey Ingrecia]

One of the reasons for doing that was because phone calls were just too damn expensive. You know, it was long distance for me to call my grandmother in Queens from Long Island. You can drive there in 40 minutes. So, you know, we were always trying to figure out ways of tricking somebody into connecting you to somebody else. It seemed such a radical concept at the time to be able to talk to somebody who was not nearby. And how dare you try to do that and not pay a huge price. Well, the Internet was a way of.

[Cory Doctorow]

Doing that and the place where it was all happening online. Usenet, Usenet, Usenet, Usenet.

[Clive Thompson]

The next big thing is the Usenet. And the Usenet is a collection of thousands and thousands and thousands of groups of people talking about different subjects. Picture it like a giant cork board marked off with tape into squares, each of which has a title. You can go up, I can go up, write a note down, scribble it up, post it to the board. Someone else can come by, have a look at it and post their response. Except millions of people do it. It said that somewhere on the Usenet, someone has the answer to every question you've ever heard of. You just gotta find the right place to ask it and ask it in the right way. So if you want to find out if Mikey's stomach exploded when he ate Pop Rocks and drank Coke, this is the place to go, baby.

[Cory Doctorow]

Cory asking the big questions, by the way. Nope, Mikey's stomach did not explode when he ate Pop Rocks and drank Coke. But now this was something you and thousands of your closest friends could find out together easily on the Internet.

[Eric Corley]

I think one of the things that was so fascinating about the early Internet was it showed how there is this hunger for people to talk in an enthusiastic, deep way about the things in their life that matter to them. Whether that's culture, whether that's politics, whether that's their lives, and that you could connect with these other weirdos who actually cared about the same stuff. It was so soul stirring. It was so much fun.

[Cory Doctorow]

This is Clive Thompson, and I'm a.

[Eric Corley]

Writer who focuses on technology, culture, and how those two things collide.

[Cory Doctorow]

The Internet was changing everything. How we communicated and connected, how we shared art and ideas. Most importantly, it was changing where the power lay. That was one of the things I was most excited about back in 1994.

[Clive Thompson]

It's changing the way we distribute music. And so if you're an independent band like Apollo Creed from Seattle, you can send them your press kit, your logo, your music, your bio, and all I have to do is come here and click a button and down comes your single.

[Dena Temple Raston]

So it's getting rid of record companies.

[Cory Doctorow]

And marketing and promotion. Exactly.

[Clive Thompson]

It means that no longer do bureaucrats control the means of distribution and production for this stuff.

[Eric Corley]

At the moment, at the moment of the mid-90s, all this stuff seemed possible. It was a real ferment of excitement about possibilities. I think that that's the main electricity that I felt sort of coursing through everyday culture.

[Cory Doctorow]

And that's what the Internet was like, exciting Electric, small, pluralistic, and profoundly anti commercial.

[Joey Ingrecia]

You know, if the Internet had been started by big corporations, you would have to pay for every email that you sent, just like every phone call, you would have to pay for it.

[Cory Doctorow]

But the early Internet wasn't like that at all.

[Eric Corley]

There was this minor explosion when a couple of lawyers decided to mass post onto a bunch of Usenet groups an advertisement for their law firm. And this was so scandalous to everyone back then that there was just, you know, weeks and months, really years of debate about whether or not this should be tolerated. Should these people be kicked off these news groups? Should we have rules that say, like, we don't want people selling things on.

[Cory Doctorow]

The Internet, or as I told the.

[Clive Thompson]

Circumstances, the Internet isn't owned by anyone. The Internet is. Bits of it and pieces of it are owned by different people. Universities, governments, municipalities, phone companies, cable companies, you name it.

[Cory Doctorow]

So how did the Internet go from this democratic ideal, this repository of all human knowledge, a space for hope and human thriving, to something so, well, shitty.

[Eric Corley]

I don't think there is a single inflection point that I could point to that would help us understand how we got from an early intranet that was pretty open and had enormous possibility, that offered a lot of control and offered a lot of competition. I couldn't point to a single moment in that journey where you could say, okay, this is all changing. Why all that wonderful promise and autonomy leaked out of the balloon was because there was no pop. There was just a bunch of little things that kept on happening.

[Cory Doctorow]

And one of those little things happened to Google search. Eventually the Internet got too big for people to know where everything was. So waves of clever people created search engines. Early search engines just looked for pages containing the words you typed, giving priority to pages that contained more of those words. This worked okay, but when it failed, boy, did it ever fail badly. If you wanted your page to rate high on the search results for a query like Mexican food, you could keyword stuff it by adding the words Mexican food a thousand times in tiny white on white type to the bottom of the page. The primitive search engines would count these all up and conclude that your page was the most important Mexican food resource in the world. Which is useless because most hungry people aren't looking for a site that just has the words Mexican food a thousand times. To weed these bad hits out of your search results, you'd have to master all kinds of arcane search engine syntax so you could exclude words and phrases, putting minus signs in front of the kind of junk that was typical of spam sites. It took forever, but those search engines were all we had, so we kept using them.

[Emmanuel Goldstein]

We were using, you know, really awful search engines that we thought were pretty good. And you saw Google and all of a sudden the film cleared from our eyes. We thought, wow, you could actually find what you were looking for on the Internet right away. Bang.

[Cory Doctorow]

This is Stephen Levy. He wrote the canonical history of Google in the How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives. Back in the early 90s, Stephen was Newsweek's tech reporter and he knew right away that Google was a story.

[Emmanuel Goldstein]

When I first saw the Google search engine, my mind was blown.

[Cory Doctorow]

So he tracked down their PR person.

[Emmanuel Goldstein]

I called her up, I said, I gotta meet these guys.

[Cory Doctorow]

These guys being Google's founders, two Stanford grad students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin. So Stephen booked a ticket from New York to San Francisco and flew out to meet them.

[Emmanuel Goldstein]

It was near Halloween. Everyone was dressed in Halloween costume. So Larry was dressed like a Viking and Sergey was dressed like a cow. He had these big plastic udders coming out from his chest. So the Viking and the cow took me into a little room and explained how page rank works.

[Cory Doctorow]

PageRank is the algorithm behind the magic, a new way that Google had developed to deliver its search results. It was totally audacious, and I say.

[Emmanuel Goldstein]

Audacious because the way they were able to locate the best result for your query was by basically not basically literally downloading the whole web, all of it, which some people thought was ridiculous. But Larry Page understood this could be done.

[Cory Doctorow]

All Larry and Sergei needed to pull it off was big, powerful servers, which.

[Emmanuel Goldstein]

They could get because they had access to servers at Stanford. And they would literally hijack them as they came in the loading dock meant for other departments.

[Cory Doctorow]

With all this yoinked power, they set up their first server, building the case for it out of Lego. Yeah, Lego, because it was cheap and cool and colorful like the eventual Google logo.

[Emmanuel Goldstein]

And then they would do math. This was like Sergey's specialty to analyze all the links that happen between websites and figuring out what important websites link to other sites. So that way you could filter out which were the perfect answers for the queries you put into the search field. And that turned to be just a quantum leap, better than the previous things.

[Cory Doctorow]

The early Internet wasn't perfect. Google came into existence because the search landscape sucked. But the point is, Google could come into existence. There was oxygen and sunshine that reached the forest floor, so new things could grow. If you could code, if you had some money, a computer or two, a couple of bins of Lego. You could, you were allowed to build something new that made the web better. Clive Thompson Again, they start off by.

[Eric Corley]

Having a really good search engine, the best search engine. And the reason why it's so good is that they are in ferocious Competition with like 12 different search engines and they have to be better than everyone else, have to fight to the top. And they do that.

[Cory Doctorow]

Just be the best, make the best product and people will switch. And we did. We all switched to Google because it worked and that mattered to Google in their early days.

[Emmanuel Goldstein]

Then there's, you know, the very famous motto that Google had was don't be evil, you know, which was coined by an engineer when, you know, someone from HR had a meeting and you know, so what is our motto? What is our, what is our, our meaning, our value. And you know, one guy said, what are you talking about? Just like, don't be evil, you know, I mean, that's it.

[Cory Doctorow]

So back in 1999, Stephen wrote that first story for Newsweek and he kept writing about Google.

[Emmanuel Goldstein]

Google's world was our world. You know, things didn't exist, but it wasn't on the web.

[Cory Doctorow]

It's like when Google did well, we all did well because we could find the stuff we were looking for, right?

[Emmanuel Goldstein]

And that came into play even more when they came up with their first big successful business product.

[Cory Doctorow]

That was ads.

[Emmanuel Goldstein]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dena Temple Raston]

This is an episode from a CBC podcast called Understood who broke the Internet. Just ahead, how ads changed Google. More after this break.

[Ed Zitron]

In cybersecurity, your greatest fear isn't the threats you see, it's the critical signals lost in the noise. Every day, security teams sort through millions of potential threats. That's why Recorded Future exists. To give you precision intelligence tuned to your needs. Our advanced AI detects patterns humans might miss, while our threat intelligence experts, veterans of military and intelligence services provide crucial context. With Recorded Future, you gain the confidence to identify critical threats and the precision to act before they become attacks. Learn why 1900 customers, including 45 plus sovereign governments, trust us to detect threats faster and and achieved 350% plus ROI within a year.

[Stephen Levy]

If you're looking for a daily guide to cybersecurity news and policy, sign up for the Cyber Daily from Recorded Future News. It serves up the day's most interesting and important cyber stories from our sister publication the Record and then aggregates all of the big cyber stories you might have missed from news outlets around the world. Just go to the Record Media and click on Cyber Daily to get all you need to know about the world of Cybersecurity right in your inbox.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Welcome back. Here's more from the CBC podcast who Broke the Internet? And host Cory Doctrow.

[Cory Doctorow]

The introduction of ads to Google marked a major shift. Emmanuel Goldstein, Again, Google, in their early.

[Joey Ingrecia]

Days, you didn't have ads on the front page. It was relatively fast, and they just seemed like cool people inventing cool things.

[Emmanuel Goldstein]

Larry and Sergey actually hated advertising. And the paper they wrote talking about page rank, they had a little thing in the end saying, boy, we hate advertising.

[Ed Zitron]

It's terrible.

[Cory Doctorow]

Stephen's talking about an article the Google founders published in a journal in 1998. And in it they explicitly wrote that, quote, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results, but.

[Emmanuel Goldstein]

They had to make money. So then they figured, well, maybe there's a way to do ads that would be terrible.

[Cory Doctorow]

So in 2000, the founders assigned an engineer to figure this out, one of Google's first eight employees, and he came up with something.

[Emmanuel Goldstein]

It's called AdWords. So what it would do was when you put a query into the search engine, it would start an auction instantly and, you know, your search term would be auctioned off to advertisers who wanted to sell a product that was, you know, related.

[Cory Doctorow]

If you searched for Mexican food on Google back in the early aughts, the results would have been the most linked to websites for Mexican restaurants in your area and reviews from local blogs and newspapers. And now with AdWords, ads would appear in a colored bar atop the normal page ranked results.

[Emmanuel Goldstein]

You know, you get the same results, but you get a new extra little, you know, set of possible results that actually might even help you if you were looking to buy something related to the search term. And the advertisers would get an audience which, you know, was primed to buy something. And it worked for Google, it worked for advertisers, and most of all, it worked for users.

[Cory Doctorow]

That is, until it didn't.

[Emmanuel Goldstein]

Yeah, well, then it got worse.

[Cory Doctorow]

And that takes us back to tech journalist Ed Zittron and the story of the fallout of the code yellow in 2019, when last we heard from them, head of Search Ben Gomes and VP of Ads Prabhagar Raghavan were sending around flurries of tense emails about whether they were going to make search worse to make more money off of ads. But Team Search pushed back. One wrote, there was a good reason our founder separated search from ads. Another team member brought up the impact any changes would have on user experience, asking, quote, what cost is acceptable? But then Vice President of Advertising Jerry Dishler laid down the law with an email that put the debate in the starkest possible terms, writing the question we are all faced with is how badly do we want to hit our numbers this quarter?

[Ed Zitron]

And he requested scrappy tactical tweaks that he would know will increase queries. And he said, and this is crazy, this is a natural quote. I also don't want the message to be we're doing this thing because the ads team needs revenue. That's a very negative message. But my question to all of you is based on the above, what do we think is the best decision for Google overall? I am becoming the joker in real time every time I read these things. It's so brazen, it's so obvious.

[Cory Doctorow]

So want to guess who won? Within weeks, Google started making changes that undid improvements that had been made to search under Ben Gome's watch a year before.

[Ed Zitron]

They took away things that would stop spammy or useless results being in there, and started moving stuff around so that Google perhaps didn't make it harder to search, they just made it harder to find things on search, which is effectively the same thing.

[Cory Doctorow]

Ed says they even removed an update from 2012 that had specifically targeted spammy search results. According to a report from SEO company Systrix, 75% of the websites that got a boost from this update were sites that had previously been downranked.

[Ed Zitron]

Now, a few months later, in May 2019, they'd roll out a redesign of how ads were shown on Google search, changing them from this bright green ad thing and a URL color that was different. Instead, it was now a tiny little thing that said ad in bold, and then otherwise it would look identical to regular search links. And I quote the Verge's John Porter here, who said it made Google's ads look just like search results now. So what I'm describing here is that changes were made to increase queries and increase revenue that made search worse.

[Cory Doctorow]

We asked Google for an interview about all of this, including interviews with Prabhagar Raghavan and Ben Gomes. Google didn't make anyone available to us, so we sent them a detailed list of questions. We asked if they made Google search worse on purpose in order to show more ads and increase advertising revenue. They did not directly answer this question, but in their response they said the changes we launch to search are designed to benefit users. We only launch changes to search after rigorous testing to confirm that a proposed change will be helpful for real people using search. We sent them some of Ben Gomes emails, the ones we've been referencing throughout this story, they pointed us to his testimony in a court case where he was asked about the same emails. Here's a summary. He said that at Google, ads and search are not in conflict with one another, that there is no difference in what our incentives are. So Google is constantly trying to increase both the quantity of searches and user satisfaction. And different people search in different ways. So changes to search are in service to making Google work for more kinds of people.

[Ed Zitron]

Foreign.

[Cory Doctorow]

So how does it work now in 2025? Well, every time I tell someone I'm making this podcast, they got an anecdote. I have a colleague, she's a vintage collector. She Googles specific old things, but all she gets back are sponsored posts for nature, new Things, or, you know, dead links. But when she skips Google and searches directly on dozens of individual resale sites like ebay, she finds exactly what she's looking for using exactly the terms she'd fed to Google. What is the point of a search engine that can't retrieve pages on major websites containing the exact phrase you searched for? Clive Thompson says he just adds Reddit to anything he types into Google.

[Eric Corley]

Now, if you want to get any results that are worth reading, you know, because Reddit, to its credit, has remained kind of like Usenet, an area that's focused on subjects.

[Cory Doctorow]

Look, I get it. Google's job has certainly gotten harder as the Internet itself has gotten so much bigger and so much more polluted with garbage. But even when I ask Google questions about Google, like how to turn off Gemini, it's maddening. AI Assistant, its instructions are wrong.

[Ed Zitron]

Google, I swear, used to not be this chaotic, but it's such a bizarre place to be. It's so strange.

[Cory Doctorow]

Ed has noticed a whole other phenomenon. How even when you get what seems like reasonable results under the surface, something strange is going on. Ed's in his apartment in Brooklyn. We're on a video call.

[Ed Zitron]

So I'm going to google.com and I'm going to type in top 10 Mexican NYC.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, Ed's the reason I keep bringing up Mexican food. This is what happens when you interview people at lunchtime. Anyway, here's what Ed gets.

[Ed Zitron]

There is just a series of different, like, YouTubes, another YouTube, another Facebook video post. Facebook, I think, is probably the worst place to watch video other than through someone's window.

[Cory Doctorow]

So he scrolls down past the videos, and actual websites start showing up.

[Ed Zitron]

And then top Mexican restaurants in New York city off of TripAdvisor. Now it then in the corner pops up asking me to sign into TripAdvisor. With Google, something I will never be doing. And as I scroll down, the page check changes and there's more ads and there's more things popping up. And now there's just the thing that says ad removed. I have no idea why that's happening. There is a American Songbook Singers outsider ad, and then a giant ad at the top for TurboTax.

[Cory Doctorow]

Ed navigates back to the search results, tries another website. On offer is another listicle.

[Ed Zitron]

Naturally, you click through to the Instagram pages of a few of these and most of them are dead because these websites are not actually kept up with. These are SEO. They're built specifically so that they rank highly on Google. Rather than actually telling you what the best New York Mexican food might be.

[Cory Doctorow]

He scrolls some more, clicks on a link that appears to be for a restaurant, but it goes through to OpenTable.

[Ed Zitron]

Which is a website that takes a cut of every single time someone books through it. But what's funny is it's not available on OpenTable. So on top of this being this incredibly insidious series of ads and stuff, this isn't even useful. These links don't goddamn work. You take until halfway down the second page to find an actual link to a Mexican restaurant. I feel like I'm in hell.

[Cory Doctorow]

So in the aftermath of all this, what happened to Ben Gomes? He went on to lead Google's learning and sustainability department after nearly two decades of building and then eventually running search. Why the move? We asked Google. They didn't answer. And what happened to Prabhagar Raghavan?

[Ed Zitron]

Google would make Prabhagar Raghavan the head of Google Search.

[Cory Doctorow]

This was in addition to his role as the head of ads. Google didn't answer our question about his job change either. But after taking over in 2020, Raghavan went on to run Google Search for the next four years.

[Ed Zitron]

And it was around 2020 that Google search started to collapse.

[Cory Doctorow]

To be clear, Ed's talking about the quality of Google Search because Google's revenues certainly didn't collapse during any of this. Their ad revenue growth soon climbed to almost twice what it had been before the Code Yellow. And over the next five years, the overall amount of money the company was bringing in was more than doubled. All this stuff, this kind of thing is why I coined my dirty little word.

[Ed Zitron]

Say it with me, folks. Inshitification.

[Cory Doctorow]

And isn't that kind of just the.

[Ed Zitron]

Perfect word to describe 2024?

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, apparently it was Words of the Year, being crowned from all corners of the dictionary world. Today we have another word so perfect and so Lewd that I'm only allowed to say it once. The Macquarie Dictionary has announced that inshittification is the word of the year for 2024. Is that making something shitty? Kind of Enshitification describes the widespread decay of the platforms we all rely on for so much. It's a three stage process. In stage one of enshitification, a platform is good to its users bad, but finds ways to lock them in. The more locked in they are, the harder it is for them to leave. When we get to stage two, that's when platforms screw their users to make things good for business customers. But those business customers, they aren't the final beneficiaries of this process. The platforms and their shareholders are. Because once these businesses, sellers, publishers, advertisers are locked in, we get to stage three of inshinification when the platform knifes them too, bleeding them out so that all the value is shifted to the platform's investors and executives. That's enshitification. A tragedy in three acts. And you experience this every day with every interaction you have with the Internet.

[Ed Zitron]

I think that one of the biggest mistakes in particular of Internet culture reporting is to separate the Internet from real life. We experience our lives, our romantic lives, our social lives, our professional lives in a digital way. Our real lives are on the Internet. We go on these services and are harassed immediately. And as a result your connection with the world is flawed. So yes, I believe this creates a genuine social malaise. And it's just, it's disgraceful because nothing had to be this way. These companies could fold their damn arms and just be like, no, no, we're not going to make it worse. But they choose to. Because they can.

[Cory Doctorow]

But why can they? Why can these companies do whatever they like to you? The Internet doesn't suck because Silicon Valley CEOs all caught the tech bro mind virus. If you were to replace all of these founders and CEOs and professional middle managers tomorrow, the Internet wouldn't suddenly be disinfy itself. The people inshifying our tech are downstream of other people, policymakers whose choices created the fecund and shitagenic environment that lets the people running tech companies convert their worst impulses into vast fortunes. Powerful people who made terrible decisions about how the Internet should work.

[Dena Temple Raston]

That was Cory Doctrow, host of CBC's who Broke the Internet. You can listen to the rest of the season wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dena Temple Raston. Click Here will be back on Friday with an encore episode of Mic Drop.

[Stephen Levy]

Looking for more of the cybersecurity and intelligence coverage you get on Click here. Then check out our sister publication the Record from Recorded Future News. You'll get breaking cyber news from reporters in New York, Washington, London, and Kiev, among others, and you'll see for yourself why it attracts hundreds of thousands of page views every month. Just go to the Record Media.