404 Media: Google Is Paying Reddit $60 Million for Fucksmith to Tell Its Users to Eat Glue

as the prophecy foretold, we are learning exactly what Google is paying Reddit $60 million annually for. And that is to confidently serve its customers ideas like, to make cheese stick on a pizza, “you can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue” to pizza sauce, which comes directly from the mind of a Reddit user who calls themselves “Fucksmith” and posted about putting glue on pizza 11 years ago.

Count me as one of the people who still thinks Google’s search results are pretty great. Maybe it’s just what I search for, but I can’t think of the last time I searched for something and couldn’t find it with Google.

However, getting to those results can be annoying.

For years I’ve trained myself to do a search and then scroll past the 1-5 ad slots above the genuine search results. This is annoying, but apparently not annoying enough for me to stick with any search alternative for too long.

What the AI responses have done for me is add more bullshit above the actual search results I want. Now I’m scrolling past the AI vomit at the top of the page, then past the ads, and then to the links that get me what I want. They’re pushing the valuable content lower and lower down the page, which is driving me nuts.

To their credit, sometimes the AI answers are useful, and they do a decent job of linking to the source that gave them the info that appeared in the AI vomit, but the hit rate is too low in my experience. Not to mention those answers take a few seconds to load, so I’m often scrolling down to the web results since they’re available instantly and I don’t have to wait to maybe get the right answer.

I have numerous Google accounts, and to get around this for myself, I’ve simply logged into a different account that hasn’t been opted into this rollout yet when I’m on google.com. It’s not great when I, a Google search defender, starts to be driven crazy…almost makes you want to put some glue in your pizza sauce.