Google Search Becomes Google Hide

G oogle’s search service used to feel like a portal to every bit of important information. Dimly remembered news stories from years earlier were instantly recalled in its search results if you could remember a single unique word or quotation. You could regularly find what you were looking for even if your search terms were roughly synonymous with the content you sought out. It felt like a genuinely enabling appendage to the human brain.

That was a long time ago, though. Then Google started messing with it. My ability to find what I want quickly atrophied as Google “improved” the algorithm for its ad business and then made “recency” an important component of every search, under the assumption that you couldn’t possibly be searching for old information. It added auto-complete so that you were more likely to search what other people had searched before you. But it started to become obvious that Google’s coders were hand-coding in exceptions and even inserting their biases. My friend noticed that you couldn’t get auto-complete to finish Pat Buchanan’s name; as you typed it out, it would suggest that you search for the far more obscure character actor Pat Buttram.

This was the first sign that Google Search was becoming something more like Google Hide.

Google Gemini, marketed as artificial intelligence, is Google Hide as a finished project. As hundreds of other journalists have demonstrated, Gemini scours all the world’s information and then tells you that you are a bad person for asking the wrong questions. Ask Gemini to praise Ross Douthat’s columns on abortion. Douthat is pro-life, and, consequently, Gemini will explain to you that it cannot praise his work because abortion is a contentious issue and it won’t express personal beliefs. But ask it to praise Douthat’s colleague Michelle Goldberg’s abortion columns, and it will praise her clarity and compassion and claim that her writing “shines a light on the human cost of anti-abortion policies.” So, Gemini is not only biased, but it lies about its biases to its users.

Here it would be normal for me to write about how Big Tech has changed in response to political events. Google Search started to decline the moment that a different kind of tech optimism started — the idea that tech companies such as Facebook were meant to midwife a global democratic revolution in places like Iran. They were powering the Barack Obama campaign, whose invasive use of data was portrayed by technologists as heroic rather than sinister. Then came 2016, when middle-aged users of Facebook and Twitter broke the rules of history and used the tools of the future to meme each other into voting for Brexit and Donald Trump. Or at least that’s how liberals viewed it. Silicon Valley has, ever since, allowed itself to be programmed by Washington, D.C., and Berlin to encode anti-populism into its results. If you wrote the wrong thing about Covid on social media, it provided the government’s view as a corrective underneath yours. It’s this fundamental antipathy toward the user that has made Google’s artificial intelligence in 2024 useless — and seemingly much dumber than Google’s once-great search product of 2004.

But the more disturbing thought is that Google Gemini is really more intelligent than Google Search. Google Search might direct you to wrongthink, like National Review or even a Steve Sailer column. Gemini would never do that. Google Search was a superpower set of eyes scrolling the internet and reporting to you — a super brain. Gemini has all that power, but it has also been given a very dim-witted social intelligence that understands that some information is true but bad to say out loud; there are some impressions that Gemini doesn’t want to give.

This is a human trait. We don’t say everything we believe to just anyone who asks. And certainly not to customers. Right now, Gemini’s socially intelligent navigation of taboos is pretty dumb and awkward. Ask it a few questions and it quickly falls into the uncanny-valley problem with responses just human enough to arouse our revulsion. But its programmers are going to learn how to make Gemini better at disguising its views and slipping through and around our taboos with greater social dexterity.

We are slowly discovering that the digital age is a race to program the internet with a set of human values and to enact those values through machines whose inhuman ferocity and consistency we can never manage ourselves. Perhaps it’s time that Americans learn that computing is a little bit like weaponry. We must either learn to compute with our own values in hand or we will be programmed by others.