My Google origin story is in 2006, a group of consultants from Hyderabad, India, working on a software installation at my Cedar Rapids office, convinced me to move to a new email platform called Gmail. At the time I needed a referral to get into Gmail, which the guys gladly gave. That decision, with unlimited ability to retain my email correspondence, made me a Google guy.

My Gmail account contains so many emails that twenty years later I have to pay an annual fee to keep them all. Part of my memoir-writing projects has been to reduce the need for all those missives dating to 2006, and therefore enabling me to delete a large swath of them. I deleted some but nowhere enough to eliminate the fee.

Recently, Google updated their terms and conditions. This time I actually read them. Here’s the crux: If you don’t like it, you can remove your content and close your account. That’s pretty much that.

The other thing, and this hasn’t fully played out yet, is a substantial decline in referral traffic from traditional search engines and social platforms to independent websites and publishers, in part like this blog. What we get instead I will call “scraping experiences” in which an apparent computer “views” every post I made on this blog within a short period of time. Last October was when this happened to me, increasing views by 1,833 percent that month before dropping back to normal in November.

According to Cloudflare, more than 50% of all internet crawler traffic is now generated by AI systems scraping information for training, rather than humans clicking links. As a reaction to such experiences, the great decoupling is happening, in which total internet usage is rising yet views on open websites are plummeting. This led site managers to opt out of Google search. Like with my read of the new terms and conditions, Google is not willing to negotiate, saying as it were, like it or leave.

Google search is not like it once was with the advent of artificial intelligence or “AI Overview.” Instead of receiving a long list of links in response to a query, Google search returns the AI Overview which writes a summary answer to the search terms. There are links embedded, but it’s not the old Google with thousands of prioritized links listed on the screen. While reading a narrative is easy, are the results accurate? Likely as accurate as the internet and that’s not saying much.

What’s an aging septuagenarian to do about this? My 2006 decision to use Gmail had consequences. I tried keeping a separate, offline Microsoft Outlook file, but I couldn’t keep up with the software changes as Microsoft went online with their products. Unbeknownst to me, in 2022, the company officially phased out the decades-old “Microsoft Office” brand, rebranding its software suites and subscription services to Microsoft 365. I haven’t been able to figure out how that impacts my legacy emails, so I reverted to using Gmail, which is fine on desktop, but limited on mobile device.

According to the Social Security Administration Life Expectancy Table, I have 12.3 years to figure this out. Over the short term, I have a lot of use for the archival material. I don’t plan to leave this issue for any surviving heirs.

Back in the day, Google prominently displayed their slogan, “Don’t be evil.” With the restructuring into Alphabet, it was de-emphasized. In 2018, Google largely removed the direct reference from the main introductory text of its code of conduct, shifting the phrase to an afterthought at the very end of the document. Here’s a short history of all that.

As long as I’m on the internet, I will use Google. It seems important to be more intentional about how I use it, and I will.