What The Big Tech Escape Hatch Should Look Like

Today in Tedium: When I spent two hours of my time, working against a deadline, deciding that I needed to build a workaround hack for Google’s AI overviews, I had no expectation as to what that would end up being. Two years later, the site is still online, despite people constantly telling me Google would kill it any day now. But meanwhile, Google has gradually let its golden goose decline over a vague belief that chatbots are the new search. (That belief got more specific at Google I/O last week. More on that later.) Yet it’s clear there’s a demand for the old thing. &udm=14, the site I built on that fateful day in a Panera, goes viral frequently. Last week, it had another one of those moments, in the wake of Google screwing with the thing people rely on yet again. Morning Brew and TechCrunch recently shouted it out, and The Verge once linked it out one day, months after it went viral, just because. And all it does is forward you to the right place. In a world of unresponsive 911 calls, it is the 912 that actually works. For today’s Tedium, I wanted to share some thoughts on what search is becoming and why. — Ernie @ Tedium

“When we look back at this time, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity.”

— Google Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis, speaking at Google I/O about the company’s focus on cutting-edge AI technology. (The line drew some amused heckles at The Verge.) In a way, it kind of makes sense he’s thinking so bold, given that Google was founded on the back of academic research. But yeah, this ain’t why most people use Google.

I put very little work into this thing.One basic-ass site against Google’s overwhelming prowess<br>To start off, I want to make a bit of a separation here. Google does a lot of good things. It also does a lot of bad things, especially in the realm of advertising.<br>I don’t think it’s fair to compare the badness of different companies on a scale—bad is bad, after all—but Google’s brand of evil is largely built from neglect for the genuinely good things it’s built.<br>You could see some of this at Google I/O, the company’s developer conference, last week. Google Beam, its attempt to make video conference calls more lifelike, continues to evolve in exciting ways, for example. And the Googlebook, the company’s evolution of ChromeOS and Android, feels like it’s coming along at a good time, given that everyone suddenly hates Windows.<br>But the thing is, how much of this did customers actually ask for? Google I/O seemed to be stuffed with things intended to sell a specific vision of how Google sees itself fitting into your life, rather than creating things that seem to demand it.<br>It’s not enough that Google is on your phone, on your wrist, or in your web browser. It must continually deepen that relationship in new ways or threaten its long-term relevance for good.<br>Two t’s in Tedium. Got it.Which brings us the AI overviews discussion. It’s so weird. Two years ago, a Google I/O event added a feature that I could not ignore, so I spent 20 minutes looking for a way to ignore it. Then I found an obscure URL code and created a website that told everyone about it. Within hours, &udm=14 became a meme.<br>That website took off in a big way because, let’s face it, we’ve decided that we need to have a say in how intrusive Google’s features get.<br>Even in the world of AI, Google does interesting things (the Gemma 4 open-weight models are quite good), but the problem is that the company is approaching the technology from a defensive stance. Love ’em or hate ’em, people choose to use ChatGPT and Claude. Google’s structural advantage is that it’s already embedded in your life, so its play has to be that it can integrate the thing that might give them value in a way that forces you to take notice.<br>On top of the AI overviews, there have been other visible signs of this kind of annoyance kibble throughout their product lines. At one point, Google put its Gemini icon in the Gmail app in the very place its account switcher button used to be, ensuring users would hit the button constantly.<br>More recently, Google put a giant button on the bottom of Google Docs by default, though it thankfully made it easy to turn that off.<br>That is Google’s modus operandi, and it has been for years, dating back to the days of Google+. (Remember, there was a time that Google just shoved everyone’s emails and search data into a social network. In fact, it was the second time in 18 months. This is not a new game for them.)<br>But just imagine if the company had decided it would just let the tech earn its place, not unlike the way Gmail or Google Photos did. The conversation would be way different. It would feel like we’re in conversation with it, rather than getting pulled down the road, kicking and screaming, ready to fight back if it gets too intrusive.<br>In so many ways, large companies like Google and Meta treat their mandates as if they can change the...