Some really shitty stuff

One of the benefits of following a bunch of women’s football accounts on Bluesky is that you come across articles like this one, about how menopause justice is being spearheaded by the “menopunks” who are forcing redress on how badly HRT was handled by the FDA in the United States and what it has cost the women who went unhelped during that era of their lives.

This is a terrible situation in Wellington, Aotearoa. Two weeks ago the sewage treatment plant failed spilling 70 million litres of raw sewage into the ocean. The current damage is caused by upwards of a further 1 billion litres that has flowed since. The marine ecosystem of Wellington’s south coast is similar to many around coastal British Columbia in terms of biodiversity and ecological health and vulnerability to sudden events like this that can set back progress by years if not decades.

I almost never link to posts that fall into the category of “I asked ChatGPT…” because I just hate that. But I will make an exception with this post, partly because Doc Searls has more integrity on these issues than most, and also because it provides a very useful benchmark of the state of the web in February 2026 and how Google made to first big move to destroy it, and then built an AI to deliver it back to you in a way that helps separate money from your wallet. Let me quote the introduction to his post in full, and we can come back it in a year or two, if I can find it again.

For a generation or more, we mostly saw and navigated the Web through Google, whose original mission was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” When we searched Google, we relied on its PageRanksystem to bring us lists of pages ranked by how likely they were to contain keywords or other search terms.

But Google Search has changed. Old pages are gone from many searches. This matters to me because I’ve been writing on the Web for thirty-one years, almost entirely on static sites. But Google no longer finds many of those. My friend Dave Askins tells me the same malady has befallen much of his own archival work, which is present on the Web, but absent from Google searches. Why?

I asked Google’s Gemini that question. Here’s what it said:

The “disappearing” of the old web is a result of a massive shift in Google’s priorities over the last few years.

While you might be looking for a specific historical document or an old forum thread, Google’s systems are now aggressively tuned to filter out what they consider “stale” or “unhelpful” content…

In the race to be a ‘helpful assistant,’ Google has stopped being a ‘universal library.

PageRank is still there, it tells me, but subordinated. To what?

Of course: Advertising.

Taking my clues from Keyords are dead, by Shalom Gonzalez in Search Engine Land, I asked Gemini to tell me “how searches by the helpful assistant might constantly be looking for what the person might eventually want to buy, so they can be advertised at when the right time comes.”

Gemini replied, 

This is the “secret sauce” of the 2026 search model. If the old search engine was a librarian, the new one is a personal shopper who is taking notes on everything you do to predict your next “need state. The transition you’re sensing is the move from Reactive Search (answering what you asked) to Predictive Search (answering what you’re going to ask).”

I am sure this is good in some ways, but it is also fuckery.