The Trust Economy Is Gone

Google recently announced changes to its most basic, broad-based search functions.

Can we trust them?

The pendulum swings back.#

I remember, as it closed only a few weeks ago¹, using Ask Jeeves to learn “How to tie a tie” before a high school orchestra concert. This was the early 2000s.

Then in the late-2000s, maybe around 2007-08, I was learning how to use Google “better,” meaning to start searching not just for keywords like “World Cup” but for questions like “Who is playing in the World Cup this year?”

This increased complexity, the better capabilities offered by search engines largely benefited us as search engine users, receiving increasingly more relevant search results.

“A.I. as a Product” versus “User data as the Product”#

When I read The New York Times article² announcing the updated A.I.-powered search features, what I read between the lines was largely a question: Who does Google serve?

For 25 years, Google’s iconic search box was a long, slender bar where people typed in keywords like “World Cup.”

In addition, people can ask follow-up questions with a chatbot on Google’s main search page. The company will also offer digital assistants, known as agents, to automate searches so that someone who may be apartment hunting can be notified of a new listing without opening a real estate site like Zillow.

I understand some of the real world benefits of A.I. I’m a daily user of Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic Claude, and even occasionally, Google and Gemini. Much of the benefit I garner today is through building repeatable, consistent processes with the help of A.I., and then finding ways of using A.I. or other automated scripts to speed up completion of those repeatable processes.

I struggle right now with some of the more nuanced, or “human”, ways of using A.I., such as for writing. But that’s another story, for another time.

My point is this: A.I. is not all Good, nor all Evil.

I do understand there are real benefits.

I also see and understand some of the risks.

One of those risks I see is trying to understand who is benefiting from these search engine updates.

Pattern Makes Meaning#

The Internet is a place of seen, and unseen, conventions.

• Clicking a website logo in the top-right will take you to the homepage.
• An icon of three horizontal lines stacked above each other signifies an expandable menu.
• Carets (>) facing to the right signify you can click to expand that text to reveal more text or content, which also changes that right-facing caret to an upside-down caret (⌄).

The pattern created by search engines was simple: the search bar.

The search bar represented progress. Prior to this seemingly inevitable progress, navigation largely happened through link lists, or aggregators or portals like America Online.

And so, a pattern became entrenched as Google became entrenched. You type into that search bar, you get an answer; the Internet that we know and yet-to-know is one Google search away.

The destination is the goal#

The second part of this established pattern was that Google was not the end result. No, the end result was your destination, the answer to your question, the pot of gold at the end of your search rainbow.

If you’re looking to buy a house, you might search for “Cedar Rapids Iowa realtors” or “houses to buy in Cedar Rapids Iowa.” Or if you’re in a large metro, you might search for houses in a specific zip code. Initially, search results would drive you to the websites of realty companies or realtors serving the area of interest. Those websites would have their own realty database, featured homes, and their own search capabilities within their realty website.

Subsequently, single-purpose-driven sites like Zillow came along. The promise of Zillow was a better user experience. No longer would you need to search Google for all of the different realty companies. No longer would you need to search all those different realty company websites, most of which had user experiences ranging from sub-par to god awful.

Zillow provided the user a consistent, repeatable experience no matter where you lived, no matter what type of house you were searching for, and no matter the listing company.

The product was still what each website offered to the user. For Google, the product was a way to navigate and find relevant websites for your search, regardless of the search query. For Zillow, in our example above, the product was the service of connecting the user to all of the realty listings meeting the user search criteria, regardless of the listing company.

The product, back then, was not you.

Who can you trust?#

For the better part of almost two decades, the Internet established the pattern that websites and the products or services on those websites were the product. What the user saw and understood was that visiting Zillow meant that the user would be able to find houses to buy.³

The user knew and, more importantly, trusted what the relationship between the user and the website entailed.

The unwritten rule and pattern established by the early days of the Internet is gone.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said Gemini’s speed and affordability made it possible to deliver it broadly — which will ultimately benefit Google.

“When people use our A.I.-powered features in search, they use search more,” Mr. Pichai said in an interview Tuesday before Google’s annual developer conference

Google is now expecting the user to trust a Google-built solution for the same use case and purpose. Really?

The Trust Economy is Gone#

Today’s internet is focused on me. The trust inherent in the Internet of Yesteryear is gone.

So why should Google or anyone else care about you as a user? Why shouldn’t they be able to focus on the raw data and profit you represent?

Why, then, should we, as the citizens of the Internet, trust Google?

Why should we trust that they have our interests at the heart of these improvements to Google.com?

We shouldn’t.

“Trust, but verify”#

I was in middle school when Wikipedia hit the dialup (home) or T1 lines (school)⁴. Instead of avoiding reality, teachers encouraged students to use Wikipedia as a resource, but not the resource; one stop among many.

We were meant to continue researching, finding other sources of information, and to verify or deny the validity of Wikipedia’s information.

The relationship we have with tech companies today is the same.

We are meant to continue researching, finding other tools or websites, and to verify the claims presented to us – whether those are A.I.-enabled search results, or fully completed emails written by an LLM.

So, use the newly improved Google.com if you want or desire. But please understand who the product is in the relationship between you and Google; the product certainly is no longer the search engine.