Let’s Call It Poogle
Because Google, as we once knew it, has gone to shit.
Part of why I’m shifting to Perplexity is that I’ve had the sense that Google was failing. I make heavy use of the exact “qUoTeD wOrDs” search method, and it stopped working, to the level I really noticed, around the spring of 2025.
Last weekend I Parabeagled My Substack and now I’ve got a really explicit example of Google’s decay.
Attention Conservation Notice:
Google navel gazing. If you’re doing OSINT using that platform, buckle tf up because it’s developed dementia. This has MAJOR implications for reality as we know it.
Evidence:
I often reference Bruce Sterling’s 1998 political thriller Distraction, it’s pretty much prophecy in my eyes. Let’s have a go at finding just how often it appears here.
Using quotes to get very specific text no longer applies, at least not to single words. Three responses here, none of which are explicitly about the novel.
Sterling is a surname, not a dictionary word, so there’s no telling from this perspective if the quotes had effect for this search. This is a unique flavor of fail I won’t make you dig out on your own - the first one mentions the Viridian Design Movement, and not Distraction explicitly. The second mentions Bruce Sterling, but not Distraction. The third mentions Sterling again, but this time a different novel, The Caryatids.
Based on Google’s results, you would know that Bruce Sterling is a major influence on me, but you would have no idea that you need to basically review Distraction on a page by page basis.
Now let’s look at what Claude Desktop /w Opus4.5 found by having access to 890 articles here via Parabeagle.
“I need a list of articles that mention the Bruce Sterling novel Distraction. I think Google is decaying quickly in its ability to find specifics.”
Conclusion:
Google’s site: qualified search function failed HARD. Specifically:
Three incorrect responses for keyword “Distraction” and nothing more available by looking further.
Three responses for keyword “Sterling”, none of which contain mention of the particular “Distraction” we seek.
No overlap at all with six correct responses from Parabeagle(!)
This immediately evokes the famous Wolfgang Pauli “That is not even wrong” quote:
“Das is nicht einmal falsch”
I first saw the utter implosion of Google’s quoted search response in the context of phone number lookups. It’s been a game for a while, lots of SEO shite for bottom feeder data brokers, but it just completely and utterly failed no later than last summer.
This failure is … many orders of magnitude more disconcerting. There is no privacy angle to capitalized “Distraction”, nor to “Sterling”. The utter failure of the site: qualifier is … not a reason I chose to career change after the 2024 election, but it would have been a significant second order influence, had I noticed it a year earlier.
We have empirical evidence of Google’s failure right here in front of us. Any of you can replicate this work.
There is a MUCH larger social concern. Is Google about to destroy the web is seven months old, but we’re going to keep coming back to that article over the coming years. The replacement of search with AI summary is a commercial disaster for the internet as we have known it.
But the problem revealed here today is even more consequential. Google is 90% of all search activity … and we can see it is no longer functional, which begs the question:
Is Google knowingly participating in the overall assault on objective reality?
The last bit of the Claude+Parabeagle response offers a clue. Has Google shifted from a former keyword indexing to a semantic search method? This makes technical sense, given the move to AI summaries replacing search response.
Do not just wave this away as some esoteric concern, I hope the economic hit to the advertising model we all know (and despise) is an easily discernible wakeup call. Maybe you should watch this video on VL-JEPA. Google appears to be making the jump from human-centric written language to the high dimension embeddings favored by machines. And they presume we’re simply going to trust them …