Don't Be Evil

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" Episode: "Don't Be Evil" Release Date: May 5, 2025 Host/Author: Cory Doctorow, CBC

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Introduction to Enshittification

[00:00 - 06:02]

Cory Doctorow opens the episode by introducing the concept of "enshittification," a term he coined to describe the decline of the modern internet. He paints a bleak picture of the internet's transformation from a utopian space into a deteriorating environment plagued by intrusive ads, hateful trolls, aggressive algorithms, zero privacy, and AI-generated low-quality content. Doctorow emphasizes that this degradation was not inevitable but resulted from deliberate decisions by powerful individuals at critical moments.

Notable Quote:

"It can feel like it was inevitable — but it didn't have to be this way."
– Cory Doctorow [00:05:21]

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The Downfall of Google Search

[02:08 - 05:28]

The narrative delves into the internal struggles within Google, particularly focusing on a 2019 crisis known as "Code Yellow." Ben Gomes, a key figure in Google's search team, faces pressure from Prabhagar Ragavan, Google's head of ads, to increase search queries. The underlying issue is that more queries translate to more ad impressions and, consequently, higher revenue.

Key Points:

• Code Yellow: A crisis indicating a moderate severity issue requiring all hands on deck.
• Prabhagar Ragavan's Directive: Push for increased search queries to boost ad revenue.
• Internal Conflict: Gomes and his team are uncomfortable with the idea of degrading search quality to serve ads better.

Notable Quotes:

"If we start optimizing to make people search more on Google search, wouldn't that mean that Google search has to get worse?"
– Colleague of Ben Gomes [04:28]

"It's a tragedy in three acts. And you experience this every day with every interaction you have with the Internet."
– Cory Doctorow [35:01]

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Historical Context: The Rise of the Internet and Google

[07:06 - 14:54]

Doctorow provides a historical overview of the internet's evolution, highlighting its early days of optimism and democratization. The internet began as a tool for communication among visionaries in the 50s and 60s, expanding in the 1980s to connect government agencies, universities, and military contractors. The public's access to the internet in the early 1990s marked the beginning of a new digital era.

Key Points:

• Early Internet: A communal and open platform with vast potential for communication and creativity.
• Emergence of Search Engines: Early search engines were rudimentary, often returning poor-quality results due to simple keyword matching.
• Google's Introduction: In the mid-90s, Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, introduced PageRank, revolutionizing search quality.

Notable Quotes:

"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."
– Cory Doctorow [12:26]

"Larry and Sergey actually hated advertising. And the paper they wrote talking about PageRank, they had a little thing in the end saying, boy, we hate advertising. It's terrible."
– Stephen Levy [22:34]

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Google's Business Model Shift: Introduction of Ads

[22:18 - 24:24]

The episode explores the pivotal moment when Google integrated advertising into its search engine. Initially, Google eschewed ads, maintaining a clean and user-focused interface. However, recognizing the need for revenue, Google's founders developed AdWords in 2000, allowing advertisers to bid on search terms, revolutionizing online advertising.

Key Points:

• AdWords Introduction: Enabled targeted advertising based on search queries through real-time auctions.
• Initial Success: Ads complemented search results without significantly detracting from user experience.
• Motto Evolution: "Don't be evil" encapsulated Google's commitment to ethical practices, even as it ventured into advertising.

Notable Quotes:

"If you searched for Mexican food on Google back in the early aughts... ads would appear in a colored bar atop the normal page ranked results."
– Cory Doctorow [23:02]

"Larry and Sergey actually hated advertising. And the paper they wrote talking about PageRank, they had a little thing in the end saying, boy, we hate advertising. It's terrible."
– Stephen Levy [22:34]

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The 2019 Code Yellow Crisis and Its Aftermath

[24:27 - 33:31]

The narrative returns to the 2019 Code Yellow incident, detailing how Google's internal efforts to improve search began to deteriorate under business pressures. Despite initial efforts by Ben Gomes and his team to enhance search quality, the ads team pushed for modifications that compromised user experience to prioritize ad revenue.

Key Points:

• Email Conflicts: Back-and-forth communications revealed tensions between the search and ads teams.
• Implementation of Changes: Google rolled back quality improvements, reintroducing spammy search results to increase ad visibility.
• Impact on Users: Search results became cluttered with ineffective ads and low-quality links, degrading the overall search experience.

Notable Quotes:

"What I believe creates a genuine social malaise. And it's just disgraceful because nothing had to be this way."
– Ed Zitron [35:44]

"Google search started to collapse... their ad revenue growth soon climbed to almost twice what it had been before the Code Yellow."
– Cory Doctorow [33:03]

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The Concept of Enshittification and Its Three Stages

[33:38 - 35:01]

Doctorow introduces "enshittification" as the official word of the year for 2024, defining it as the systematic decay of internet platforms through a three-stage process:

1. Lock-in: Platforms initially provide good service but implement strategies to lock in users, making it difficult for them to leave.
2. Screwing Users: Platforms exploit users to benefit business partners or revenue streams, compromising user experience.
3. Eventification: The final stage where platforms extract maximum value for themselves, often at the expense of all stakeholders.

Key Points:

• Stage One: User lock-in through engaging but controlling features.
• Stage Two: Exploitation of users to serve business interests.
• Stage Three: Maximizing profits by prioritizing the platform's interests over users and partners.

Notable Quotes:

"Inshidification describes the widespread decay of the platforms we all rely on for so much... a tragedy in three acts."
– Lori Brown [34:22]

"Every big tech company is changing in front of our very eyes."
– Lori Brown [05:21]

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Real-World Implications and User Experiences

[35:01 - 32:21]

The podcast highlights how enshittification impacts everyday users through degraded services and poor user experiences. Ed Zitron shares his personal frustrations with Google Search, illustrating the tangible decline in search quality and reliability.

Key Points:

• User Frustration: Increased ads, irrelevant search results, and dead links frustrate users.
• Shift to Alternative Platforms: Users resort to platforms like Reddit or specific niche websites to find reliable information.
• Policy Failures: Lack of regulatory intervention allows tech companies to prioritize profits over user experience.

Notable Quotes:

"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 [28:21]

"I feel like I'm in hell."
– Ed Zitron [31:53]

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Conclusion: Accountability and Future Prospects

[35:44 - End]

Doctorow concludes by emphasizing that the degradation of the internet is not solely due to the actions of tech CEOs or founders. Instead, it's a consequence of broader policy decisions and systemic issues that allow companies to prioritize profits over user welfare. He calls for accountability and changes in policy to reclaim and restore the internet's potential.

Key Points:

• Systemic Responsibility: Blaming only tech leaders overlooks the role of policymakers in shaping the internet's trajectory.
• Need for Policy Intervention: To prevent further enshittification, comprehensive policy measures are necessary.
• Hope for Reclamation: Despite the current state, there's potential for restoring the internet through collective action and informed decision-making.

Notable Quotes:

"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, they the Internet wouldn't suddenly disenshitify itself."
– Cory Doctorow [35:38]

"The people inshitifying 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."
– Cory Doctorow [35:43]

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Production Credits and Additional Information

[37:42 - End]

The episode wraps up with production credits, acknowledging the team behind "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" and promoting previous seasons.

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Overall Takeaway: "Don't Be Evil" provides a comprehensive analysis of how deliberate internal decisions within tech giants like Google have contributed to the decline of the internet's quality and user experience. Through detailed narratives, expert insights, and personal anecdotes, Cory Doctorow elucidates the multifaceted nature of enshittification and underscores the urgent need for systemic changes to restore the internet's original promise.

Transcript

[Kathleen Goldhar]

Hey there. I'm Kathleen Goldhar, and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper, and that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley. The list goes on. For the insider scoop, find crime Story in your podcast app.

[Cory Doctorow]

This is a CBC podcast. 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 Citron. He's a tech journalist who covered this Code Yellow situation. The term Code Yellow doesn't 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. But 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 bounce back and forth between Ben Combs 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, hey, if we.

[Ed Zitron]

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, 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.

[Lori Brown]

Amazon sucks right now. Uber sucks right now.

[Cory Doctorow]

Netflix sucks. Facebook sucks.

[Lori Brown]

Every big tech company is changing in.

[Cory Doctorow]

Front of our very eyes.

[Kathleen Goldhar]

Reels are shoved down your face. 24.

[Stephen Levy]

You have violence.

[Cory Doctorow]

You have images that can't be verified. Since Canadians have been blocked from seeing news content on Instagram and Facebook. It feels like being back in grade school, but you're only in grade School with the bullies.

[Lori Brown]

AI is basically going to destroy the earth for a bunch of tech fake of the nationals. Ian Hannah Mansing. That seems to be selling cryptocurrency, bro.

[Cory Doctorow]

Things are getting progressively worse.

[Ed Zitron]

Who is in charge of this?

[Lori Brown]

Say it with me folks. Inshittification and shitification.

[Cory Doctorow]

Insidification.

[Lori Brown]

Inshitification.

[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 shitified. 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? This is episode one. Don't be evil.

[Clive Thompson]

Good evening, I'm Lori Brown. The amount of hype surrounding the Internet has reached epidemic proportions for those of 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 nation 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?

[Clive Thompson]

Joining me now is Cory Doctorow.

[Cory Doctorow]

Cory Doctorow. I'm Cory Doctorow.

[Clive Thompson]

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

[Cory Doctorow]

In 1994, 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.

[Clive Thompson]

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

[Emanuel Goldstein]

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.

[Clive Thompson]

Uh huh.

[Emanuel Goldstein]

Playing with yourself. More or less.

[Stephen Levy]

Wow.

[Reshma Saujani]

Where is this available?

[Cory Doctorow]

On the cbc.

[Ian Hannah Mansing]

Oh wow.

[Reshma Saujani]

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, Emanuel Goldstein. Emmanuel was an early adopter of the Internet too, and he remembers what people were saying about it at the time.

[Reshma Saujani]

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

[Reshma Saujani]

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, 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.

[Reshma Saujani]

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 know, 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 seems 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 doing that.

[Cory Doctorow]

And the place where it was all happening online, Usenet, Usenet, Usenet, Usenet.

[Emanuel Goldstein]

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's 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. No, 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.

[Ian Hannah Mansing]

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.

[Ian Hannah Mansing]

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.

[Emanuel Goldstein]

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.

[Clive Thompson]

So it's getting rid of record companies and marketing and promotion.

[Cory Doctorow]

Exactly.

[Emanuel Goldstein]

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

[Ian Hannah Mansing]

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.

[Reshma Saujani]

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.

[Cory Doctorow]

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

[Ian Hannah Mansing]

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 the Internet?

[Cory Doctorow]

Or as I told the CBC back.

[Emanuel Goldstein]

Then, 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.

[Ian Hannah Mansing]

I don't think there is a single inflection point that I could point to that would help us understand how we got from on 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.

[Stephen Levy]

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.

[Stephen Levy]

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

[Cory Doctorow]

So he tracked down their PR person.

[Stephen Levy]

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.

[Stephen Levy]

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 PageRank 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.

[Stephen Levy]

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.

[Stephen Levy]

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.

[Stephen Levy]

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 the 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.

[Ian Hannah Mansing]

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.

[Stephen Levy]

And 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 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.

[Stephen Levy]

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?

[Stephen Levy]

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

[Cory Doctorow]

That was ads.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Stephen Levy]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

When Google met advertising, everything changed. Foreign.

[Joy Bubbles]

Hey, I'm Reshma Sajani, founder of Girls who Code and Moms First. I consider myself a pretty successful adult woman. So why is it that in midlife, as I'm about to turn 50, I feel so stuck? Join me as I try to find the answer on my so called midlife from Lemonada Media. I talk to experts and extraordinary guests about divorce, exercise, menopause, sex, drugs, and more to understand what we're going through and how to make the most of it. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

[Cory Doctorow]

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

[Reshma Saujani]

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

[Stephen Levy]

Larry and Sergey actually hated advertising. And the paper they wrote talking about PageRank, they had a little thing in the end saying, boy, we hate advertising. 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 advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results, but they.

[Stephen Levy]

Had to make money. So then they figured, well, maybe there's a way to do ads that wouldn't 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.

[Stephen Levy]

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

[Stephen Levy]

Yeah, you get the same results, but you get a little 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.

[Stephen Levy]

Yeah, well, you know, then it got worse.

[Cory Doctorow]

And that takes us back to tech journalist Ed Zitron 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, add 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. 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 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.

[Ian Hannah Mansing]

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 a 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. Naturally, you click through to the Instagram.

[Ed Zitron]

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. What's funny is it's not available on OpenT Table. 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, Ragavan 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.

[Lori Brown]

Say it with me, folks, inshittification. And isn't that kind of just the perfect word to describe 2024?

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, apparently it was Words of the.

[Lori Brown]

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.

[Cory Doctorow]

The Macquarie Dictionary has announced that inshidification is the word of the year for 2024. Is that making something shitty? Kind of. Inshidification describes the widespread decay of the platforms we all rely on for so much. It's a three stage process. In stage one of inshidification, a platform is good to its users 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 eventification, 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 inshittification. 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, they the Internet wouldn't suddenly disenshitify itself. The people inshitifying 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. Next time on Understood, you had Congress.

[Ian Hannah Mansing]

Saying we're going to make it illegal for you to write a certain type of software.

[Cory Doctorow]

The next thing the conference attendees knew, he had been arrested by the FBI. What do we want? Free Dimitri. When do we want it? Now. And that was just the beginning of the bad stuff they had in mind. Understood who Broke the Internet is written and produced by Matt muse, our showrunner A.C. rowe and meet Cory Doctorow. In this episode you heard clips from CBC and Mr. Who's the boss? BuzzFeed first post the project Australian Community Media Zhenya Turkova this is Important. Evan Dorvell and CBS News Roshni Nyer is our coordinating producer. Mixing and sound design by Julian Uzieli. Our story editor is Veronica Simmons. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe. Lokos, you can follow Understood on whatever Inshitified app you're using. To listen to me now and check out our previous seasons like the Naked Emperor, a deep dive into the fallen Bitcoin king. Sam Bankman Fried.

[Ian Hannah Mansing]

For more CBC podcasts.

[Cory Doctorow]

Go to CBC CA Podcasts.