Doctorow: Gemini beats Google because search rotted out

There is a sheepish admission Cory Doctorow keeps hearing from people he respects, and it landed in his Pluralistic newsletter today: they have stopped clicking through Google's blue links and now rely on Gemini's AI summaries, even though they know the summaries hallucinate. The summaries, in his telling, work 'often enough', and the underlying search has gotten worse than the hallucinations.

His read on why is the part worth dwelling on. Search did not get worse by accident. Doctorow describes a long internal fight between engineers who wanted to give people answers and executives who realised that worse results meant more queries and therefore more ad impressions. He quotes the logic plainly: 'if you need to search two or three times to get the answers to your questions, that means the company can show you two or three times as many ads.'

The economics around that choice are extreme in his telling. He cites the Google and Meta display-ad duopoly taking 51% of display advertising revenue, far above what ad intermediaries historically captured, which squeezed publisher revenue and pushed them to load more ads, which pushed users to ad-blockers, which Google has spent a decade making harder to run inside Chrome. Doctorow calls that arms race 'a race to the absolute bottom'. The result, he argues, is a Gresham's Law dynamic on the web itself, where low-effort spam outranks careful work, and where AI search then preferentially draws from spam sites 'to produce decontextualized, highly confident recommendations'.

The honest caveat is that this is a polemic, not an audit. Doctorow gestures at Kagi, a $10/month paid search engine that rents Google's index and reportedly returns better results, as evidence that Google could rank well and chooses not to; the piece does not put numbers on how much of Google's traffic now resolves inside an AI summary, or on what publishers are actually losing in dollars. Take the framing as one of the sharpest critics' framing, not a measurement.

The forward thought, for anyone whose business depends on the open web, is that the floor of 'visit our site' traffic is being quietly removed. Paid-index alternatives, direct subscriber relationships, and email or RSS distribution get more strategic the more the on-page answer becomes the answer.