I don’t usually pass along Twitter gossip like it’s news, but it isn’t everyday the world’s most famous whistle-blower gets into a tissy with the underground rulers of all things search.
Let me rewind: Edward Snowden, everybody’s favorite fugitive-turned-technology-critic, shot out a seemingly off-the-cuff post on Twitter today professing his disdain for the current state of internet search:
Is it just me, or have search results become absolute garbage for basically every site? It’s nearly impossible to discover useful information these days (outside the ArchWiki).
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) November 16, 2021
In what, to this reporter, appears to be a very strange flex, Barry Schwartz quote-tweeted Snowden and called on fellow search engine expert and Google employee Danny Sullivan to opine on the matter:
Does he know something we don’t know 👀 cc @dannysullivanhttps://t.co/e0Ght5N9EU
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) November 16, 2021
I don’t understand exactly what’s happening here, but it looks like marketing. All I know, is that Edward Snowden was having no part of it.
No, I definitely mean search engines (among others), and Google is the worst by far, even w/o poor results:
*inaccessible to anyone who cares about their privacy (improper Tor blocking)
*hostile, scripts-required captchas
*page redirect for mandatory, scripts-required cookie— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) November 16, 2021
Background: I should make it clear that when I refer to Schwartz and Sullivan as underground rulers, I’m paying them a compliment. They’re experts on what they do – which is search marketing or buzzword unification or something. Nobody knows!
But Edward Snowden‘s proclivity against mincing words is a sight to behold when he expands on his initial response with bullet points, tips, and pre-emptive replies to unspoken excuses. It’s truly a thing of art and, because I don’t have a horse in this race, I hope to see more of it.
The fact that Google is totally unusable is no skin off my back, because I can work around it, but whoever decided every Google property should be gated by a redirect to a scripts-required cookie-gate has made the internet less safe.
No law or bot problem justifies this.
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) November 16, 2021
Search marketing. SEO. Jargon. Whatever. If you’re reading this because someone at TNW figured out the secret handshake for getting Google‘s Search algorithm to pick us up for this news cycle, good for Google and TNW.
But I’m not sure if I should be telling the next generation of journalists to take marketing or communications courses. Consider me in Snowden‘s corner for this bout.