Is Google Headed for the Big Computer Room in the Sky? Actually Yes It Is
June 9, 2025
Just a dinobaby and no AI: How horrible an approach?
As freshman in college in 1962, I had seen computers like the clunky IBMs at Keystone Steel & Wire Co., where my father worked as some sort of numbers guy, a bean counter, I guessed. “Look but don’t touch,” he said, not even glancing up from his desk with two adding machines, pencils, and ledgers. I looked.
Once I convinced a professor of poetry to hire me to help him index Latin sermons, I was hooked. Next up were Digital Equipment machines. At Halliburton Nuclear a fellow named Bill Montano listened to my chatter about searching text. Then I bopped into a big blue chip consulting firms and there were computing machines in the different offices I visited. When I ended up at the database company in the early 1980s, I had my own Wang in my closet. There you go. A file cabinet sized gizmo, weird hums, and connections to terminals in my little space and to other people who could “touch” their overheated hearts. Then the Internet moved from the research world into the mainstream. Zoom. Things were changing.
Computer companies arrived, surged, and faded. Then personal computer companies arrived, surged, and faded. The cadence of the computer industry was easy to dance to. As Carmen Giménez used to say on American Bandstand in 1959, “I like the beat and it is easy to dance to.” I have been tapping along and doing a little jig in the computer (online) sector for many years, around 60 I think.
I read “Google As You Know It Is Slowly Dying.” Okay, another tech outfit moving through its life cycle. Break out your copy of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying. Jump to Acceptance section, read it, and move on. But, no. It is time for one more “real news” write up to explain that Googzilla is heading toward its elder care facility. This is not news. If it is, fire up your Burroughs B5500 and do your inventory update.
The essay presents the obvious as “new.” The Vox write up says:
Google is dominant enough that two federal judges recently ruled that it’s operating as an illegal monopoly, and the company is currently waiting to see if it will be broken up.
From my point of view, this is an important development. Furthermore, it has nothing to do with the smart software approach to search. After two decades of doing exactly what it wanted, Google — like Apple and Meta — are in the spotlight. Those spotlights are solar powered and likely to remain on for the foreseeable future. That’s news.
In this spotlight are companies providing a “new” way to search. Since search is required to do most things online, the Google has to figure out how to respond in an intelligent way to two — count ‘em — big problems: Government actions and upstarts using Google’s own Transformer innovation.
The intersection of regulatory action and the appearance of an alternative to “search as you know it” is the same old story, just jazzed up with smart software, efficiency, the next big thing, Sky Net, and more. The write up says:
The government might not be the biggest threat to Google dominance, however. AI has been chipping away at the foundation of the web in the past couple of years, as people have increasingly turned to tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity to find information online.
My view is that it is the intersection, not the things themselves that have created the end-of-the-line sign for the Google bullet train. Google will try to do what it has done since Backrub: Appropriate ideas like Yahoo, Overture, and GoTo advertising methods, create a bar in which patrons pay to go in and out (advertisers and users), and treat the world as a bunch of dorks by whiz kids who just know so much more about the digital world. No more.
Google’s legacy is the road map for other companies lucky or skilled enough to replicate the approach. Consequently, the Google is in Code Red, announcing so many “new” products and services I certainly can’t keep them straight, and serving up a combination of hallucinatory output and irrelevant search results. The combination is problematic as the regulators close in.
The write up concludes with this statement:
In the chaotic, early days of the web, Google got popular by simplifying the intimidating task of finding things online, as the Washington Post’s Geoffrey A. Fowler points out. Its supremacy in this new AI-powered future is far less certain. Maybe another startup will come along and simplify things this time around, so you can have a user-friendly bot explain things to you, book travel for you, and make movies for you.
I disagree. Google became popular because it indexed Web sites, used some Clever ideas, and implemented processes that produced pages usually related to the user’s query. Over time, wrapper software provided Google with a way to optimize its revenue. Innovation eluded the company. In the social media “space”, Google bumbled Orkut and then continued to bumble until it pretty much gave up on killing Facebook. In the Microsoft “space,” Google created its own office and it rolled out its cloud service. There have not had a significant impact in the enterprise market when the river of money flows for Microsoft and whatever it calls its alleged monopolistic-inclined services. There are other examples of outright failure.
Now the Google is just spewing smart software products. This reminds me of a person who, shortly before dying, sees bright lights and watches the past flash before them. Then the person dies. My view is that Google is having what are like those near death experiences. The person survives but knows exactly what death is.
Believe me, Google knows that the annoying competitors are more popular; to wit, Sam AI-Man and his ChatGPT, his vision for the “everything” app, and his rather clever deal with Telegram. To wit, Microsoft and its deals with most smart software companies and its software lock in the US Federal government, its boot camp deal with Palantir Technologies, and its mind-boggling array of ways to get access to word processing software.
Google has not proven it can deal with the confluence of regulators demanding money and lesser entities serving up products and services that capture headlines. Code Red and dozens of “new” products each infused with Gemini or whatever the name of the smart software is today is not a solution that returns Google to its glory days.
The patient is going through tough times. Googzilla may survive but search is going to remain finding on point information. LLMs are a current approach that people like. By itself, it will not kill Google or allow it to survive. Google is caught between the reality of meaningful regulatory action and innovators who are more agile.
Googzilla is old and spends some time looking for suitable elder care facilities.
Stephen E Arnold, June 9, 2025
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