By Steven Levy
Publication Date: 2026-05-22 15:00:00
It’s been 17 It’s been years since I attended the legendary weekly search quality meeting in the Ouagadougou conference room at Google’s Mountain View campus. On this Thursday morning, around three dozen engineers, product managers and executives sat around a table or lay on the floor to discuss why certain search queries or categories did not return a perfect result and to suggest solutions. In 2010, these meetings resulted in Google making 550 changes to its search algorithm, a number that seemed impressive at the time.
This memory appears to be a color type. At Google’s I/O developer conference this week, a keynote speaker – search leader Liz Reid – officially relegated good old-fashioned search to virtual oblivion. This was a continuation of a process that began two years ago when Google introduced “AI Overview,” its summaries that sit at the top of the search results page and literally lurk above the famous “10 blue links.” By this time, these connections had already been compromised, so all too often…
