Big Tech whales? They'd be kelpless without the rest of us to feed them

A visit by site owners to Google's HQ to discuss the state of search was highly revealing - just not in the way Google would like. 

by Rob Corbidge

Published: 12:25, 31 October 2024

Ecosystem is a much abused word. In the tech sphere, it is frequently favoured by those attempting to use the language of managerialism for the purposes of obscuring market abuses. In such errant use, it implies that there is a natural order to things, and if that order fails, then a break down of something vital will occur.

The word that should be used in a Big Tech context is actually just plain old "system", as in made by humans, and changeable by them.

A couple of particular dispatches this week made us think of such things. Google, you might have heard of them, invited a group of site owners to a face-to-face at the company's Mountain View HQ for the 2024 Google Web Creator Summit.

In a wonderful account of whistling into the wind in a strange place in California, Joshua Tyler told us exactly what we all probably know already: that Google regards our collective content endeavours as utterly disposable. As he put it: "Google has never done anything like it before. After this account, they likely never will again."

Read it, if only for the account of the joyless Googlers playing ping pong "in a tiny, fishbowl room deep within the bowels of Google’s labyrinth".

Also attending the event was Mike Hardaker, founder of the Mountain Weekly News, with a similarly fascinating account of what happened during the event. He asked some hard questions, as you would if your traffic is down 97% following the devastating trail of destruction left by Google's most recent HCU.

"How are you going to feel in a year if zero sites recover?" he asked of Google's search grandees. "And everyone in this room that works for Google, how will you also feel? Otherwise we just wasted three days to come out here, time is the most valuable thing we have to offer."

This yielded a typically awful Big Tech response from Pandu Nayak, Google's VP of Search: "...  we do want to say we have a vested interested in having a great web ecosystem. We are very closely tied to the web ecosystem. I think users benefit hugely from a vibrant ecosystem. Now that doesn't answer your question if you will recover or anyone else in the room will recover. But we think having a vibrant web ecosystem is important, and that drives a lot of our work."

Just to repeat: "Now that doesn't answer your question if you will recover or anyone else in the room will recover."

So they're just words. And too many of them, all empty. Ecosystem. 

If it is an ecosystem, on the basis of this meeting, Google is a whale, and it thinks we are a never ending supply of kelp. That works both ways though, and once again if it is indeed an "ecosystem" then no kelp, no whale. The big cetaceans are kelpless without us.

Tyler attempted to get some light on why Google was now showing such strong preference in search results to a small number of large brands. He didn't find this easy, as he explains: "I kept pushing, and eventually, our Googler (whose name I’m not allowed to tell you) wrote 'diversity of results' at the top of the whiteboard he was using, as if to signify I should shut up and move on."

You couldn't make up what happened next, "When our group session was over, I left the room for a break. While I was gone, 'diversity of results' was erased from the top of the whiteboard and rewritten at the bottom, in much tinier lettering." 

By actions, not words, shall you know them.

The meeting was attended by Google’s Chief Search Scientist. You would think that he could provide some definite answers to site owners' questions. He didn't. As Tyler puts it, "Google’s wise wizard of search science wrapped things up with a self-congratulatory speech about what great a job we were doing at helping Google improve so he can deliver better search results to his users. Search results without any of us in them.

"It was then I realized this wasn’t our funeral, it was Google's."

In a separate but related observation, Tyler also noted how deserted the vast Google campus seemed, even on a normal working day. Estimates put Google's current workforce at around 180,000 people. 

How long before an activist investor starts to ask what they're all doing?