Google Archive

Google is adding a switch to allow website owners to opt out of being featured in their “AI” overviews and related slopsearch results. With this new toggle in Search Console, website owners can decide if they want their site to appear in and help ground responses in our generative AI Search features (like AI Overviews, AI Mode or AI Overviews in Discover). Sites that opt out will not receive traffic or impressions from our generative AI features. This control will not be used as a ranking signal for search results outside of these generative AI Search features. This work builds on our long history of designing tools, like snippet controls and Google-Extended, that give websites more choice. ↫ Mrinalini Loew at Google’s The Keyword blog While it’s nice of Google to offer such an opt-out to website owners, their claim that opting out won’t effect your regular search ranking rings hollow to me. I simply just do not trust Google in any way, shape, or form to not weaponise their “AI” against anyone who doesn’t want to be sucked up, regurgitated, and spat out in one of their slopsearch tools. On top of that, regular Google Search is dead anyway, so even if they keep their promise, it’s moot because Google users are going to be force-fed the slopsearch tools instead of the regular Google Search. I honestly have no idea how much traffic OSNews gets from Google at this point, and while I can look it up, I just don’t really care, and think it’s probably not that much. I could opt us out, but the real problem is that such an opt-out won’t stop Google’s slopbots – or anyone else’s slopbots – from taking our writing and training their “AI” tools on it, so what’s the point of going through the effort? I doubt Google is relevant enough for us.

After Google killed its search engine a few days ago, one question remained: how exactly does advertising fit into all of this? Google is obviously not going to move to chatbot search without somehow adding ads to your conversation with the pachinko machine, so everybody was wondering how that was going to work, exactly. Well, we have the answer, and it’s an obvious one. When researching a topic, consumers want to know exactly how a product suits their unique situation. In fact, 75% of people report making faster, more confident decisions using AI Mode in Search. 1 That’s why we’re testing two new types of ads, built with Gemini, that offer relevant product details along with helpful guidance. To help people evaluate their choices, both of these new formats will feature an independent AI explainer as part of the ad. Our Gemini model evaluates and synthesizes information about a product or service, and displays that context alongside the advertiser’s creative. This coherent, independent response ensures transparency and builds trust. These formats will also continue to be clearly labeled as “Sponsored.” ↫ Google’s Ads & Commerce Blog Of course they’re going to just generate the ads with “AI”, too. Google will offer two types of “AI”-generated ads in their new chatbot search tool, the first of which will simply be an “AI”-generated answer to a user’s question. If you ask the Google chatbot “how can I clean my bed sheets of unintended nightly slop discharge?”, Google will generate an ad based on the features of a slopcleaner washing machine detergent product and show that to you. The second type comes in when a user asks something like “what is the best way to kill a search engine?” Google’s chatbot will then show a number of ways to kill a search engine, and one of the items in that list might be an ad generated by Google, alongside the customary unrelated information, wrong information, and made-up nonsense. Google claims both of these types of ads will be labeled as such, but I doubt that small label will be noticed by many, and of course, there’s no way to know any of the other answers the chatbot generates aren’t paid-for either. Here, too, though, we must ask the question what the end game is. This new chatbot search engine is clearly trying to keep you on Google’s website, but in doing so, it’ll deprive large numbers of websites of the traffic they need to survive. If they can’t survive, they’re die. If they’re dead, they can’t produce the content Google “AI” needs to slobber up to spit back out in Google’s chatbot search. Chatbot search is also an agent of its own destruction, because you can’t generate improved slop with nothing but slop. Because, and I can’t repeat this often enough, nobody has ever used “AI” to produce anything of value.

Google has announced that it will release Chrome for Linux on ARM64 in the second quarter of this year. Launching Chrome for ARM64 Linux devices allows more users to enjoy the seamless integration of Google’s most helpful services into their browser. This move addresses the growing demand for a browsing experience that combines the benefits of the open-source Chromium project with the Google ecosystem of apps and features. This release represents a significant undertaking to ensure that ARM64 Linux users receive the same secure, stable, and rich Chrome experience found on other platforms. ↫ The Chromium Blog While the idea of running Linux on Arm, only to defile it with something as unpleasant as Chrome seem entirely foreign to me, most normal people do actually use Google’s browser. Having it available on Linux for Arm makes perfect sense, and might convince a few people to buy an Arm machine for Linux, assuming the platform can get its act together.

Text ads on the search results page will now be grouped with a single “Sponsored results” label. This new, larger label stays visible as people scroll, making it clear which results are sponsored — upholding our industry-leading standards for ad label prominence. We’re also adding a new “Hide sponsored results” control that allows you to collapse text ads with a single click if you want to focus only on organic results. In our testing, we found that the new design helps people navigate the top of the page more easily. The new design keeps the size of ads the same and you’ll still never see more than four text ads in a grouping. ↫ Omkar Muralidharan on Google’s Ads and Commerce Blog I guess this is an improvement, but I doubt this will convince anyone to turn off their ad blocker or switch back to Google from another search engine. The option to collapse sponsored results is especially welcome, but I wish they’d gone a step further and added an option in settings to permanently collapse them – which, of course, is never going to happen. Removing any and all “AI” summaries would be nice, too, but with the entire technology industry pushing stringent “AI” KPIs on employees, that’s not going to happen, either. Regardless, it’s still an improvement to Google’s results page, and while we may not realise it in our little bubble here, the number of people whose search experience this will improve is absolutely massive. It’s been a while since I’ve seen Google make a change to their search results page that doesn’t make it substantially worse, so I’ll take what I can get.

When someone has a plumbing emergency, they’re not flipping through a phone book; they’re Googling for help nearby. That’s why local SEO matters more than ever for plumbing businesses. If your name doesn’t show up in those local searches, you’re missing out on jobs that could’ve been yours. Thankfully, getting found online isn’t as hard as it sounds. With the right strategies in place, you can turn online visibility into real, paying customers. Start with Google Business Profile Optimization One of the first steps in digital marketing for plumbers is claiming and optimizing your Google Business Profile. This is what appears when someone searches for “plumber near me,” and it’s packed with potential. Add your business hours, contact details, services, and plenty of photos. Encourage happy customers to leave reviews, and always reply to them. Reviews help boost your ranking and show potential customers that you’re responsive and trustworthy. Keeping this profile updated is a small task with a big impact. Use Location-Based Keywords Across Your Website People don’t just search for “plumber.” They look up phrases like “drain cleaning in ” or “emergency plumber near .” That’s why location-based keywords are so important. They help your business appear in searches that are specific to your service area. Add these keywords to your homepage, service pages, image alt texts, and meta descriptions. This tells Google exactly where you work and what you offer. It also helps visitors know right away that you serve their area, which builds instant trust. Create Service Pages for Each Location You Cover If you work in multiple towns or neighborhoods, create a separate service page for each one. These pages should mention the area name in the title, headers, and throughout the text. Include unique content for each page to prevent duplication. For example, instead of a single generic service page, create separate pages for “Water Heater Repair in ” and “Toilet Installation in .” This enhances your local reach, making it easier for potential customers to locate you. Plus, it boosts your SEO by showing relevance in each area you serve. Earn Backlinks from Local Websites Backlinks, links from other websites to yours, are like digital referrals. Local backlinks are even more valuable when you’re trying to establish a strong presence in a specific area. You can earn these by sponsoring community events, listing your business in local directories, or being featured in neighborhood blogs. Write guest posts, connect with local bloggers, or ask your suppliers to mention your business online. Each backlink signals to search engines that your site is trustworthy and relevant. And the more relevant the site linking to you, the better your SEO will be. Publish Helpful, Local-Focused Content Regularly One of the best parts of digital marketing for plumbers is using content to their advantage. Writing blog posts about common plumbing problems, seasonal maintenance tips, or FAQs can boost your visibility and show that you know your stuff. Focus on local topics, such as how to protect pipes during your area’s winter or the local water issues people commonly face. Make your content conversational and easy to understand. When people find helpful answers on your site, they’re more likely to remember your name when they need a plumber. Fresh content also keeps your site active, which Google loves. Showing up in local searches doesn’t have to be complicated. It’s about being clear, helpful, and consistent online. Focus on the basics: a solid Google Business Profile, smart keyword use, and content that speaks to the people you serve. Local SEO is one of the most effective ways to ensure your plumbing business appears when and where it matters most.

In Chrome, Skia is used to render paint commands from Blink and the browser UI into pixels on your screen, a process called rasterization. Skia has powered Chrome Graphics since the very beginning. Skia eventually ran into performance issues as the web evolved and became more complex, which led Chrome and Skia to invest in a GPU accelerated rasterization backend called Ganesh. Over the years, Ganesh matured into a solid highly performant rasterization backend and GPU rasterization launched on all platforms in Chrome on top of GL (via ANGLE on Windows D3D9/11). However, Ganesh always had a GL-centric design with too many specialized code paths and the team was hitting a wall when trying to implement optimizations that took advantage of modern graphics APIs in a principled manner. This set the stage for the team to rethink GPU rasterization from the ground up in the form of a new rasterization backend, Graphite. Graphite was developed from the start to be principled by having fewer and more comprehensible code paths. This forward looking design helps take advantage of modern graphics APIs like Metal, Vulkan and D3D12 and paradigms like compute based path rasterization, and is multithreaded by default. ↫ Michael Ludwig and Sunny Sachanandani at the Chromium Blog The level of complexity in browsers and their rendering engines blows my mind every time I read about it. When I first got access to the internet, it consisted of static pages with text and still images, but now browser engines are almost as complex as entire operating systems. Not all of that progress has been good – boy has a lot of it not been good – but we’re stuck with it now, and thus people making browsers have to deal with stuff like this. If you ever wonder why there really only are two browser engines in the world – Google’s Blink and Apple’s WebKit – this is your answer. Who in their right mind wants to develop something like this from scratch and compete with Google and Apple?

If you ever wanted to know what it was like to be an engineer at Google during the early to late 2000s, here you go. Now even though Google is fundamentally a spyware advertising company (some 80% of its revenue is advertising; the proportion was even higher back then), we Engineers were kept carefully away from that reality, as much as meat eaters are kept away from videos of the meat industry: don’t think about it, just enjoy your steak. If you think about it it will stop being enjoyable, so we just churned along, pretending to work for an engineering company rather than for a giant machine with the sole goal of manipulating people into buying cruft. The ads and business teams were on different floors, and we never talked to them. ↫ Elilla Even back then, Google knew full well that what they were doing and working towards was deeply problematic and ethically dubious, at best, and reading about how young, impressionable Google engineers at the time figured that out by themselves is kind of heartbreaking. In those days, Google tried really hard to cultivate an image of being different than Apple or Microsoft, a place where employees were treated better and had more freedom, working for a company trying to make the web a better place. Of course, none of that was actually true, but for a short while back then, a lot of people fell for it – yes, including you, even if you now say you didn’t – and reading about the experiences from people on the inside at the time, it was never actually true.

What if you want to find out more about the PS/2 Model 280? You head out to Google, type it in as a query, and realise the little “AI” summary that’s above the fold is clearly wrong. Then you run the same query again, multiple times, and notice that each time, the “AI” overview gives a different wrong answer, with made-up details it’s pulling out of its metaphorical ass. Eventually, after endless tries, Google does stumble upon the right answer: there never was a PS/2 Model 280, and every time the “AI” pretended that there was, it made up the whole thing. Google’s “AI” is making up a different type of computer out of thin air every time you ask it about the PS/2 Model 280, including entirely bonkers claims that it had a 286 with memory expandable up to 128MB of RAM (the 286 can’t have more than 16). Only about 1 in 10 times does the query yield the correct answer that there is no Model 280 at all. An expert will immediately notice discrepancies in the hallucinated answers, and will follow for example the List of IBM PS/2 Models article on Wikipedia. Which will very quickly establish that there is no Model 280. The (non-expert) users who would most benefit from an AI search summary will be the ones most likely misled by it. How much would you value a research assistant who gives you a different answer every time you ask, and although sometimes the answer may be correct, the incorrect answers look, if anything, more “real” than the correct ones? ↫ Michal Necasek at the OS/2 Museum This is only about a non-existent model of PS/2, which doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. However, what if someone is trying to find information about how to use a dangerous power tool? What if someone asks the Google “AI” about how to perform a certain home improvement procedure involving electricity? What if you try to repair your car following the instructions provided by “AI”? What if your mother follows the instructions listed in the leaflet that came with her new medication, which was “translated” using “AI”, and contains dangerous errors? My father is currently undertaking a long diagnostic process to figure out what kind of age-related condition he has, which happens to involve a ton of tests and interviews by specialists. Since my parents are Dutch and moved to Sweden a few years ago, language is an issue, and as such, they rely on interpreters and my Swedish wife’s presence to overcome that barrier. A few months ago, though, they received the Swedish readout of an interview with a specialist, and pasted it into Google Translate to translate it to Dutch, since my wife and I were not available to translate it properly. Reading through the translation, it all seemed perfectly fine; exactly the kind of fact-based, point-by-point readout doctors and medical specialists make to be shared with the patient, other involved specialists, and for future reference. However, somewhere halfway through, the translation suddenly said, completely out of nowhere: “The patient was combative and non-cooperative” (translated into English). My parents, who can’t read Swedish and couldn’t double-check this, were obviously taken aback and very upset, since this weird interjection had absolutely no basis in reality. This readout covered a basic question-and-answer interview about symptoms, and at no point during the conversation with the friendly and kind doctor was there any strife or modicum of disagreement. Still, being into their ’70s and going through a complex and stressful diagnostic process in a foreign healthcare system, it’s not unsurprising my parents got upset. When they shared this with the rest of our family, I immediately thought there must’ve been some sort of translation error introduced by Google Translate, because not only does the sentence in question not match my parents and the doctor in question at all, it would also be incredibly unprofessional. Even if the sentence were an accurate description of the patient-doctor interaction, it would never be shared with the patient in such a manner. So, trying to calm everyone down by suggesting it was most likely a Google Translate error, I asked my parents to send me the source text so my wife and I could pour over it to discover where Google Translate went wrong, and if, perhaps, there was a spelling error in the source, or maybe some Swedish turn of phrase that could easily be misinterpreted even by a human translator. After pouring over the documents for a while, we came to a startling conclusion that was so, so much worse. Google Translate made up the sentence out of thin air. This wasn’t Google Translate taking a sentence and mangling it into something that didn’t make any sense. This wasn’t a spelling error that tripped up the numbskull “AI”. This wasn’t a case of a weird Swedish expression that requires a human translator to properly interpret and localise into Dutch. None of the usual Google Translate limitations were at play here. It just made up a very confrontational sentence out of thin air, and dumped it in between two other sentence that were properly present in the source text. Now, I can only guess at what happened here, but my guess is that the preceding sentence in the source readout was very similar to a ton of other sentences in medical texts ingested by Google’s “AI”, and in some of the training material, that sentence was followed by some variation of “patient was combative and non-cooperative”. Since “AI” here is really just glorified autocomplete, it did exactly what autocomplete does: it made shit up that wasn’t there, thereby almost causing a major disagreement between a licensed medical professional and a patient. Luckily for the medical professional and the patient in question, we caught it in time, and my family had a good laugh about it, but the next person this happens to might not be so lucky. Someone visiting a

Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in some online advertising technology, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, adding to legal troubles that could reshape the $1.86 trillion company and alter its power over the internet. Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said in a 115-page ruling that Google had broken the law to build its dominance over the largely invisible system of technology that places advertisements on pages across the web. The Justice Department and a group of states had sued Google, arguing that its monopoly in ad technology allowed the company to charge higher prices and take a bigger portion of each sale. ↫ David McCabe at The New York Times Google has come under fire from all sides in the United States, being declared an abusive monopoly in two different court cases covering search and now online advertising. In this case, Google controls 87% of the online advertising market in the US, which clearly confers monopoly power onto the company. No actual remedies have been proposed yet in this case, though, but breaking up the company is on the table. Google isn’t the only company facing antitrust court cases in the US, as Amazon and Apple, too, have the US government breathing down their necks. All three of these companies have overtly been trying to buy the favour of the new regime in Washington, but so far, without any success. I doubt we’ll get as far as a breakup, but I definitely think that’s the only real way we’ll ever get proper market forces at work again in the technology market. Not that any of us are really “consumers” in this online ad business, but of course, monopoly pricing still affects us through higher prices for the goods being advertised. If companies are forced to accept Google’s higher pricing for online ads, those costs will definitely be offloaded to consumers. As such, even breaking up a monopoly that doesn’t seem to affect us personally can still improve our lives by lowering prices.

There’s no escaping Rust, and the language is leaving its mark everywhere. This time around, Chrome has replaced its use of FreeType with Skrifa, a Rust-based replacement. Skrifa is written in Rust, and created as a replacement for FreeType to make font processing in Chrome secure for all our users. Skifra takes advantage of Rust’s memory safety, and lets us iterate faster on font technology improvements in Chrome. Moving from FreeType to Skrifa allows us to be both agile and fearless when making changes to our font code. We now spend far less time fixing security bugs, resulting in faster updates, and better code quality. ↫ Dominik Röttsches, Rod Sheeter, and Chad Brokaw The move to Skrifa is already complete, and it’s being used now by Chrome users on Linux, Android, and ChromeOS, and as a fallback for users on Windows and macOS. The reasons for this change are the same as they always are for replacing existing tools with new tools written in Rust: security. FreeType is a security risk for Chrome, and by replacing it with something written in a memory-safe language like Rust, Google was able to eliminate a whole slew of types of security issues. To ensure rendering correctness, Google performed a ton of pixel comparison tests to compare FreeType output to Skrifa output. On top of that, Google is continuously running similar tests to ensure no quality degradation sneaks into Skrifa as time progresses. Whether anyone likes Rust or not, the reality of the matter is that using Rust provides tangible benefits that reduce cost and lower security risks, and as such, its use will keep increasing, and tried and true tools will continue to be replaced by Rust counterparts.

Google, on its Google Maps naming policy, back in 2008: By saying “common”, we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming. In other words, if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage. Google, today, in 2025: Google has confirmed that Google Maps will soon rename the Gulf of Mexico and Denali mountain in Alaska as the “Gulf of America” and “Mount McKinley” in line with changes implemented by the Trump Administration, but users in the rest of the world may see two names for these locations. Nothing is worth less than the word of a corporation.

Google says it has begun requiring users to turn on JavaScript, the widely used programming language to make web pages interactive, in order to use Google Search. In an email to TechCrunch, a company spokesperson claimed that the change is intended to “better protect” Google Search against malicious activity, such as bots and spam, and to improve the overall Google Search experience for users. The spokesperson noted that, without JavaScript, many Google Search features won’t work properly and that the quality of search results tends to be degraded. ↫ Kyle Wiggers at TechCrunch One of the strangely odd compliments you could give Google Search is that it would load even on the weirdest or oldest browsers, simply because it didn’t require JavaScript. Whether I loaded Google Search in the JS-less Dillo, Blazer on PalmOS, or the latest Firefox, I’d end up with a search box I could type something into and search. Sure, beyond that the web would be, shall we say, problematic, but at least Google Search worked. With this move, Google will end such compatibility, which was most likely a side effect more than policy. I know a lot of people lament the widespread reliance on and requirement to have JavaScript, and it surely can be and is abused, but it’s also the reality of people asking more and more of their tools on the web. I would love it websites gracefully degraded on browsers without JavaScript, but that’s simply not a realistic thing to expect, sadly. JavaScript is part of the web now – and has been for a long time – and every website using or requiring JavaScript makes the web no more or less “open” than the web requiring any of the other myriad of technologies, like more recent versions of TLS. Nobody is stopping anyone from implementing support for JS. I’m not a proponent of JavaScript or anything like that – in fact, I’m annoyed I can’t load our WordPress backend in browsers that don’t have it, but I’m just as annoyed that I can’t load websites on older machines just because they don’t have later versions of TLS. Technology “progresses”, and as long as the technologies being regarded as “progress” are not closed or encumbered by patents, I can be annoyed by it, but I can’t exactly be against it. The idea that it’s JavaScript making the web bad and not shit web developers and shit managers and shit corporations sure is one hell of a take.

They tried to keep it from prying eyes, but several people did notice it: Google made a pretty significant policy change regarding the use of fingerprinting by advertisers. While Google did not allow advertisers to use digital fingerprinting, the company has now changed its mind on this one. Google really tried to hide this change. The main support article talking about the reasoning behind the change is intentionally obtuse and nebulous, and doesn’t even link to the actual policy changes being implemented – which are found in a separate document. Google doesn’t highlight its changes there, so you have to compare the two versions of the policy yourself. Google claims this change has to be implemented because of “advances in privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) such as on-device processing, trusted execution environments, and secure multi-party computation” and “the rise of new ad-supported devices and platforms”. What I think this word salad means is that users are regaining a modicum of privacy with some specific privacy-preserving features in certain operating systems and on certain devices, and that the use of dedicated, siloed streaming services is increasing, which is harder for Google and advertisers to track. In other words, Google is relaxing its rules on fingerprinting because we’re all getting more conscious about privacy. In any event, the advice remains the same: use ad-blockers, preferably at your network level. Install adblocking software and extensions, set up a Pi-Hole, or turn on any adblocking features in your router (my Ubiquiti router has it built-in, and it works like a charm). Remember: your device, your rules. If you don’t want to see ads, you don’t have to.

Don’t you just love it when companies get together under the thin guise of open source to promote their own interests? Today Google is pleased to announce our partnership with The Linux Foundation and the launch of the Supporters of Chromium-based Browsers. The goal of this initiative is to foster a sustainable environment of open-source contributions towards the health of the Chromium ecosystem and financially support a community of developers who want to contribute to the project, encouraging widespread support and continued technological progress for Chromium embedders. The Supporters of Chromium-based Browsers fund will be managed by the Linux Foundation, following their long established practices for open governance, prioritizing transparency, inclusivity, and community-driven development. We’re thrilled to have Meta, Microsoft, and Opera on-board as the initial members to pledge their support. ↫ Shruthi Sreekanta on the Chromium blog First, there’s absolutely no way around the fact that this entire effort is designed to counter some of the antitrust actions against Google, including a possible forced divestment of Chrome. By setting up an additional fund atop the Chromium organisation, placed under the management of the Linux Foundation, Google creates the veneer of more independence for Chromium than their really is. In reality, however, Chromium is very much a Google-led project, with 94% of code contributions coming from Google, and with the Linux Foundation being very much a corporate affair, of which Google itself is a member, one has to wonder just how much it means that the Linux Foundation is managing this new fund. Second, the initial members of this fund don’t exactly instill confidence in the fund’s morals and values. We’ve got Google, the largest online advertising company in the world. Then there’s Facebook, another major online advertising company, followed by Microsoft, which, among other business ventures, is also a major online advertising company. Lastly we have Opera, an NFT and cryptoscammer making money through predatory loans in poor countries. It’s a veritable who’s who of some of the companies you least want near anything related to your browsing experience. I highly doubt a transparent effort like this is going to dissuade any judge or antritrust regulator from backing down. It’s clear this fund is entirely self-serving and designed almost exclusively for optics, with an obvious bias towards online advertising companies who want to make the internet worse than towards companies and people trying to make the internet better.