Since around the turn of the millennium, Google Search has been a cornerstone of the internet. Users loved the reliable search experience with Google’s “10 blue links” and the unspoken promise: The website you click is the website you get.
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Now, Google is beginning to replace news headlines in its search results with titles generated by artificial intelligence. After doing something similar in the Google Discover news feed, it is also starting to change the titles in the traditional “10 blue links”.
What we’re seeing is a “small” and “narrow” experiment, one that hasn’t yet been approved for full release, Google spokespeople Jennifer Kutz, Mallory De Leon , and Ned Adriance The Verge. They won’t say how “small” this experiment actually is. In recent months, many on The Verge staff have seen examples of headlines we never wrote appearing in Google search results — headlines that don’t follow editorial style and with no indication that Google replaced the original words.
And Google says that it modifies how they appear and other sites in search, not just the news.
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When Google decided it wouldn’t stop replacing news headlines in Google Discover with The Verge and its competitors, it was like a bookstore ripping off the covers of the books it displays and changing their titles. We spend a lot of time trying to write headlines that are truthful, interesting, entertaining, and worthy of users’ attention without resorting to clickbait, but Google seems to think we have no inherent right to promote our work in this way.
The good news, for now, is that these altered titles appear to be few and far between and are not yet the kind of misleading titles we have seen on Google Discover. Compared to that and other misleading titles on Google Discover, the distorted titles we see on Google Search are relatively mild.
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But these are only the first titles we have seen Google change. The company can change the agreement even more. While Google says this is an “experiment”, you should not assume that this means it will remain limited.
