I basically have never used the Googie search engine. Back when there were dozens of search engines, I futzed around with all of them, but I’ve never trusted the Googie. Their “Don’t be evil” mantra rubbed me the wrong way the moment I heard it. It’s a form of begging the question. That’s a term that’s been bowdlerized so effectively by the internet it’s unrecognizable, I know, but that’s exactly what it was. Assumes facts not in evidence to be true without argument. It’s a slur backed up by nothing. And as we’ve seen with their recent image generator contretemps, they simply prefer their own brand of extra-strength evil to everyone else’s. “Don’t be evil” is just a mafia don in church.

I’ve been quite adept at gaming the Googie’s search results for other people, however. It’s not personal Sonny; it’s strictly business. Everything I do for others, I do in what I call my Googie Ghetto. I segregate their browser, their Search Console, whatever they’re calling their Googie My Business thingie this week, their maps, and everything else they have from anything I do in my real life. I do the same thing with lots of other things I handle for others. There are no Friendface buttons on this website. Anything to do with social media is in the Googie ghetto, too. It’s a bad part of town, and I act like Snake Plissken if I have to go there. I’m mystified when people tell me about seeing ads on YouBoob videos and search results. I’ve literally never seen one. I’ll eat their bandwidth, but I’m not giving them an inch.

Googie’s having a shitfit lately, and I’m rather enjoying it, although it’s making a lot of work for me when I’m not Bruce Wayneing and the Search Engine Optimization signal is lit. They can’t deal with Open AI, and its integration into the Microsclerosis search engine, Bingo. I’m sure you’ve heard all sort of things about Open AI, but at their core, they’re useful for only one thing. They allow you to get sh*t off of the internet without actually looking at it, especially without looking at what Googie wants you to see. The search results are still being gamed, but you don’t look at the search results. You look at an amalgam of all the sites in the search results. Not the same thing, and definitely not Googie’s thing.

I’m old enough to remember life before the intertunnel got going. I think that’s the only major demarcation of generations that matters anymore. Pass/fail. Either it was always there for you, or it wasn’t. I knew how it all worked, before it even existed: Googie is just the Yellow Pages, stolen. It may come as a shock to youngins, but it was actually a lot easier to find what you wanted in the big, dogeared, often-thrown tome of the Yellow Pages than in a search engine. It was more, well, businesslike, and easier to skip over the parts that didn’t interest you.

I knew something about Googie before it was born, because I knew and understood the Yellow Pages. So I’ll give you the benefit of my experience, which is offered free here, and worth every penny: The worst plumber was always AAA Plumbing. They didn’t know how to perform any plumbing, so they changed their name in order to get listed in the Yellow Pages first instead, because everything was listed alphabetically. Gaming the system to be listed first is nothing new, chilluns. I advise you to trust people who game a system like that only a little. And you should trust people who set up a system like that zero-point-zero.