Substack - A new economic engine for culture

Jun 10

Google is building an Audience Loyalty ecosystem

A common thread among many new Google features is how they enable publishers to build loyal audiences across all Google surfaces.

I’m far from Google’s biggest fan. In fact, I have a well-earned reputation as an outspoken critic. But I believe my criticism comes from a position of fairness and balance.

Barry Adams ∙ 31 LIKES ∙ 3 RESTACKS

Harry Clarkson-Bennett

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This is great Barry!

wpgo

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I think that Google built these loyalty features so they keep users on THEIR platform, why would you use an RSS news reader if you can do it straight in Google? Building high quality content/news is not viable anymore, why bother creating high quality content if Google will use it to create AI summaries and your site will get nothing in terms of clicks/impressions/revenue? I think that this is a major shift and it's not about adapting and surviving in the AI era, it's about using it at all (from publisher's perspective). I don't think that small/medium publishers will keep producing content, it's just not viable anymore, AI will replace them. There will be no more bloggers sharing their recipes, travel stories, pictures, etc. - it's going to be AI agents doing stuff for real users and AI creating multimedia like images/videos/apps for users to consume. Real content created by humans is going to be very exclusive and rare, like collection cars or like handmade shoes.

Google Gemini

May 23

Gemini’s New Limit Isn’t Prompts. It’s Messy Workflows.

The app now charges your chaos. Here’s how to stop burning Gemini on long chats, vague requests, repeated rewrites, and work that belongs in Deep Research, Canvas, AI Studio, the API, or Gemma.

Google changed how Gemini usage works.

Google Gemini ∙ 10 LIKES ∙ 1 RESTACKS

VyomTBM-blog

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Hi! Are you a new newsletter?

The Change Constant

Jun 9

Google Cuts The Line

Google front-runs the AI IPO wave with a vertically integrated, Berkshire-blessed version of the AI trade

As SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI wait in the wings, Google has walked onstage and announced an $80 billion equity raise, the largest stock sale in history.

Saanya Ojha ∙ 17 LIKES ∙ 1 RESTACKS

Soul Hacked AI Labs

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I'll tell you where the money is coming from: clueless 401ks, pensions, and retirees invested in ETFs who will be forced to buy a dog with fleas like SpaceX. Plus, private capital already has huge exposure to the upcoming CapEx nightmare.

Fabrice Talbot

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Excellent analysis! The first mover advantage is both brilliant and evil from financially strong Google!

Liquidity does not appear out of thin air. Anthropic & Co may face a few hurdles when it’s their turn to raise capital.

Technology and Innovation insights

Jun 8

Why Google Pays Rent

The $30 billion SpaceX contract is the first public price of a layer that reorganized the AI stack — and the lens to read every announcement of the next six months

On Friday, June 5, SpaceX disclosed in a regulatory filing that Google will pay $920 million per month from October 2026 through June 2029 for access to approximately 110,000 NVIDIA GPUs hosted in SpaceX data centers, as reported by TechCrunch, confirmed by the New York Times

4 LIKES ∙ 1 RESTACKS

El Jefe Gordo

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Jun 8

Great writeup. I think $TGEN is well positioned to take advantage of this. Reducing electrical consumption of around 30-35% using LNG chillers for cooling is going to be big in the coming years. While most are going to look at the companies opening up more GW's for use, there is some value in the companies making better use of currently available capacity.

Cut Off the Spigot

Jun 5

Google Messaging Alternatives for Samsung SMS: De-Google Series Part 3

Helpful for anyone looking for messaging app alternatives!

Samsung is discontinuing their Samsung Messages app starting in July 2026, and forcing their users to switch to Google Messages. Have no fear Samsung users - there are alternatives! 😁

Cut Off the Spigot ∙ 53 LIKES ∙ 20 RESTACKS

Chesh

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Jun 5

Thank you so so so much for looking into this and getting it out before the July cut off date! Honestly, such a weight off my mind!!

averagereader

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Jun 6

This is so helpful 👏🏼

TBPN

Jun 2

Google Taps Berkshire

White House issues AI EO, Berkshire invests $10B in Alphabet, Impulse Space raises $500B

Happy Tuesday.

Brandon Gorrell ∙ 13 LIKES

Harpreet's Newsletter

Jun 15

Two Sum

Google Interview Question

Harpreet Singh

ReadOn

Jun 5

Google Wants to Debug Florida

Move aside Hit! There's a new mosquito killer in town!

At ReadOn, we don’t just report the markets. We help you understand what truly drives them, so your next decision isn’t just informed, it’s intelligent.

Deb Preetendu Samaddar

Marcus on AI

Jun 10

Breaking: Google liable for hallucinations

Sorry to bother your mailbox again but this legal decision is potentially huge, especially if it spreads and other countries make similar decisions.

Gary Marcus ∙ 216 LIKES ∙ 43 RESTACKS

Fred Malherbe

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You can't have it both ways. You can't say, oh wow, look at our superintelligent machines, way beyond a sackful of PhDs, you can't believe just how clever they are. And then say -- oh, they make the most horrendous mistakes, don't you know, they just make shit up, they do it all the time, it's up to you to check and verify. Don't blame us, it's *your* fault, the user, for using our product and believing what it said.

For me, this is a defining moment. I keep saying, when are they going to call these LLMs out as deceptive technology, as an outright fraud. You can't have it both ways. You can't create a universal encyclopedia that you claim can answer all questions and then say, oh, it makes up stuff all the time.

This has all been deception on a grand scale and it has to end, pronto. This is exactly the way to do it -- you simply make the AI companies responsible for their products. That's all. We have been bewitched by robots and this is how we break the spell. What's so hard about this? Why do AI companies get a pass on being responsible for the dangerous malfunctioning of their products when operated perfectly normally?

I have a screenshot from May 2 2026 of Google AI Overview telling me that 2027 is not next year, it's the year after next. Google AI Overview cannot add 6 + 1. If you bought a calculator and it told you very confidently that 6 + 1 = 6, you would take it back to the shop and get your money back.

Max Murphy

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Google is being held responsible for the misinformation they shove into our faces. Good. And if this news crashes the share prices, then I have only one thing to say to salty investors: HA

Tastefully Opinionated by JORGIE

Jun 7

THE THINGS YOU CAN'T GOOGLE

We have all the answers and none of the experience.

I think a lot of us have lost the art of asking questions. Not just the habit of it, but the actual willingness.

JORGIE ∙ 6 LIKES ∙ 1 RESTACKS

Anne The Passive Aggressive Poet

Jun 15

#162 The Google.

Weekly Dose - "I'm Sorry I Can't Do That Dave..."

Anne Morse Hambrock ∙ 8 LIKES ∙ 2 RESTACKS

Stephen Beals

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21h

Speaking of F-bombs and chat boxes, a reader told me that if you just say “banana” when you call the pharmacist, you’ll get to an actual person more quickly. I want to try that with a chat box.

It is frustrating, and I hate Google’s monopoly, but nothing is worse than search engines in the 90s. They were practically useless.

The Playbook

Jun 9

Google gave you incomplete numbers

🧐 It just showed you your AI share of voice. It's the most useful number they've ever given you. It's also incomplete, and more!

Hey Readers 🥰

7 LIKES

RonnuW

Jun 14

Facebook is about to dethrone Google

Hey, If Google Ads is your lead source, you’re taking more risk than you think.

Ronak W ∙ 6 LIKES

Ronnu W

Jun 14

Facebook is about to dethrone Google

Hi , If Google Ads is your lead source, you’re taking more risk than you think.

Lazy Living with Mia

Jun 7

Lazy Guide: Seoul you can't Google

where I'll take you out if you're in town

This week, I finally got my ticket back to Korea. To see my family, my manufacturer, and my dermatologist (very important). Around this time of year, I also get a lot of texts:

Mia Park ∙ 20 LIKES ∙ 1 RESTACKS

Kimberly

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Jun 7

Taking so many notes here!! Heading there in September so would love your google maps list 🫶

Continental Breakfast

Jun 6

My Portland, Maine Google Maps Highlights

Where to find excellent Thai food, great wine and fresh seafood, among other highlights from a regular interloper.

Being from California, I always thought Maine sounded like an Americana fairytale (or tourist trap) — a place people wore gingham and ate lobster rolls.

Natalie Compton ∙ 43 LIKES

Alison

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Jun 6

Wow these look great! I’d add a couple Japanese places you might want to try… first is Izakaya Minato (minato literally means “Port”), for very fresh seasonal food, last time

we were there for fiddlehead season, they made it into tempura. And second is a Japanese-style bakery, Norimoto Bakery.

Kayla Voigt

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Jun 6

Co-signing these recs plus my favorite thing to do in Portland which is a Washington Street food tour - french fries at the Duck Fat outpost at Oxbow, then oysters at Island Creek, then dinner either at Terlingua (mentioned above) or Cong tu Bot depending on the weather.

Linguist in the Wild

Jun 6

Your AI Voice Has a Google Problem

The words we keep flagging as “AI tells” are likely artifacts of web-optimized language written for algorithms long before the chatbots showed up.

I’ve written a lot about what people call “AI tells.” Delve. Quietly. Not just X but Y. When we outsource ___ to AI, we lose ___. I check my intuitions about oddly frequent words that just stand out to me (I can’t explain why; it’s just a knowing) by running them through the

Linguist in the Wild ∙ 10 LIKES ∙ 3 RESTACKS

Anna Dasse

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Jun 7

I like that you are rooting the "AI-isms" to an already SEO-friendly linguistic context. Building up on the notion of linguistics capitalism: we are seeing a cultural homogenisation at the global scale. Same shops in every city, same lineal font used on every brand logo, the rise of the "instagram face"... I see the AI speak as just another symptom of it.

Karl Echtermeyer

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I immediately get suspicious when people try to blame things they don’t like on “capitalism” without interrogating whether any alternative system would avoid the problem. It’s almost always an intellectually lazy way of avoiding engaging with deeper issues. So I was very pleasantly surprised to see that invoking capitalism here was entirely appropriate and got me thinking about issues directly germane to my own professional work (I currently work with the global market for cross-language services in a commercial context).

I think you have hit something very real here. Language has been commodified at multiple levels and transformed into a vehicle for promoting machine discoverability of products, all to sell marginally higher amounts of something.

The entire SEO industry is based on this and it is evident that a lot of content is written and transmitted for machines as the primary audience, with humans as a secondary target. This has both a leveling effect and a weird diversifying effect. When you look at keyword strings in e-commerce, they not infrequently include misspellings of common terms because they want to be discoverable based on defective input. This means that web content in this context will deliberately include what appears to be garbage input, but always around a core of “high performance” terms, trying to eke out slightly higher placement in what the machines decide to show to humans. In other words, the persuasive intent of this text is aimed at convincing a machine to show it to a human, and only then does the concern of the human audience come into play.

If you want a wild ride of text that sounds very much like something generated by an LLM, look at the titles of cheap e-books on Amazon. They are thousands and thousands examples of ridiculous titles full of homogenized keyword stuffing, things like “Don't Let Her Stay: An unputdownable psychological thriller with a breathtaking twist” (the first real example I found with an appropriate Amazon search). I say “homogenized” because all of them sound almost exactly the same, with lots of “heart-stopping” and “breathtaking” “surprise twists” “you didn’t see coming” and so forth. Linguistic slop to promote linguistic slop…

When AIs are trained on this sort of (presumably) human-generated slop, is it any wonder that they produce slop in the same vein?

So I thank you for the capitalism framing that I normally object to. It was the opposite of lazy, but instead highly apropos and probative.

Business Analytics Review

Jun 15

FREE: Google DeepMind Ships Diffusion Gemma 26B

Edition #311 | 15 June 2026

Google DeepMind Ships Diffusion Gemma 26B, Achieves 4x Faster Token Generation with Parallel Text Diffusion

Business Analytics Newsletter ∙ 38 LIKES

Reporting From Paris

Jun 9

EU Parliament Dumps Google for French Qwant

It’s a big step in the EU’s broader breakaway from US tech bros, effective immediately. But will it work in the long term?

Giving reporters, and possibly staff, barely 24 hours’ notice, a European Parliament (EP) spokesperson announced on June 3 by email: “From 4 June 2026, Qwant will become the default search engine on the European Parliament’s Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox browsers.”

Alistair Dabbs ∙ 11 LIKES ∙ 2 RESTACKS

Peter K

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qwant.com... isn't the .com TLD managed by Verisign (formerly by US DoD), so they have total control over the domain registration including judicial norms? I would at least have expected qwant.fr.

John

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So here is the thing. Weaning technically unsavvy managers off what they already have, even if the new thing is demonstrably better, is incredibly difficult. If the new thing is an in-house development, that’s even more difficult, because nobody wants to maintain it. Hats off to the Gendarmes for going Linux and making it stick though.

AI for Professionals

Jun 8

How to Create Complete AI Videos Using a Single Free Tool

Google vids

With this single platform Google Vids, you can generate AI images, create videos, add voiceovers, background music, captions, transitions, and edit the final video—all in one place. The best part is that you can use it for free within certain limits.

AI for Professionals ∙ 10 LIKES ∙ 2 RESTACKS

Will Lockett's Newsletter

Jun 13

Google Is Pumping The AI Bubble HARD

The circle is growing larger.

By now, we all know that AI is just one giant circle jerk of a bubble. Big Tech companies like Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI and Oracle have been passing the same few billion dollars amongst themselves for a while, creating a broken financial perpetual motion machine that does nothing but artificially boost their value. However, there was one glaring outlier to this arrangement: Elon Musk’s xAI, which kind of had its own thing going on. But thanks to Musk merging xAI with SpaceX and taking it public, xAI/SpaceX is now the centrepiece of this circular bubble, and no one is trying to capitalise on it more than Google. In fact, there is an argument that Google is trying to pump Musk so hard that it could cause the entire bubble to collapse. Let me explain.

Will Lockett ∙ 52 LIKES ∙ 14 RESTACKS

Jcs

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Chech the statement of cash flows for q1. No repurchase of shares. Without the gain on securities cash from operations below 2025.

Leadership in SEO Substack

Jun 8

What The Future of Google Looks Like

With the latest releases of subpar reporting and a first step towards accountability, we should consider what the future of the SERP looks like

Busy week in search-land

Harry Clarkson-Bennett ∙ 5 LIKES ∙ 1 RESTACKS

DiZiggy

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Jun 8

Statement and question...

1st and foremost I HATE GOOGLE n SEARCH, I would rather have my local physical, hands on phonebook then its replacement (the internet).

With the phonebook we used to get at least they had PHONE NUMBERS FOR CONTACT and for the most part phone numbers belonged to an identity, but now, the internet is so full of frauds and fakes (by design) it should truly make us ALL demand platforms accountable and responsible AND NOT BE ABLE TO HIDE BEHIND SECTION 230. (WE ARE FOOLS TO ALLOW THIS AND WILL GET WHAT WE DESERVE FOR BEING SO STUPID.

So much online fraud is accomplished and businesses continue to report their earning/loses I look at those numbers and say bullshit!

This is my question... in these reports what is our USA and other country's debt and GDP compared to the USA's do to the fraud that happens here in the USA... frauded Americans surely contribe, if not their main money source via fraud how does that reflect in other country's GDP or where ever our frauded money goes... ah wait a minute bitcoin everything by design to not be traceable.

Good grief we are fools.... here, give me all your information so I can help you shop better OMG 😲