Davey Alba
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davey.bsky.social
Davey Alba
@davey.bsky.social
14K followers 1.2K following 230 posts
Bloomberg tech reporter / Google, Big Tech, misinfo / https://daveyalba.com / ask for my Signal
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davey.bsky.social
In @melissaryan.bsky.social's view, this political climate—in which public officials who try to provide transparency are politicized and attacked—is an even bigger obstacle than budget cuts in the fight against false claims.

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
Trump’s team has already overseen a massive scale back of FEMA’s staffing, funding and programming. As part of a review of contracts, FEMA ended its agreement with ZeroFox, according to a former official familiar with the situation. A FEMA spokesperson confirmed that it ended the ZeroFox contract in April. For Melissa Ryan, founder of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation, the current political climate — in which public officials who attempt to provide transparency are often politicized and attacked — is a bigger obstacle than budget cuts in the fight against false claims. “So many of the new government appointees are Trump loyalists, and attempting to actually respond effectively to disinformation would make whoever made the attempt a target for MAGA and the administration,” she said.
September 18, 2025 at 1:35 PM
davey.bsky.social
FEMA even hired cybersecurity firm ZeroFox to take down misinfo on social media, but the effort was cut short. House Republicans, led by Jim Jordan, were investigating tech companies for alleged censorship; after internal discussions, FEMA quickly ended all social media content removal requests
Afterwards, FEMA put together a Workplace Protection Task Force involving security, intelligence and communications professionals to manage incoming threats. Protective measures included using specialized software to flag personnel previously targeted online as at risk of more harassment. But there were limits to how far the government could influence content moderation. At the time, outspoken Republicans led by House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan were investigating tech companies, alleging that the platforms were censoring conservative viewpoints under federal government pressure. After initially approving ZeroFox to assist with facilitating takedowns, FEMA later asked that the company end all social media content removal requests. Per internal documents, the move came after staff discussions that it wasn’t advisable for the agency to contract for services that took any action beyond passive threat monitoring. ZeroFox declined to comment.
September 18, 2025 at 1:24 PM
davey.bsky.social
NEW: Bloomberg obtained 100s of pages of agency emails & other docs via FOIA, shedding new light on how disaster-related misinfo affects the govt's emergency response, sucks up resources & puts staff at risk.

with @zhirji.bsky.social @jasonleopold.bsky.social

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
Headline: Chaos Inside FEMA as Death Threats Distract from Hurricane Response
September 18, 2025 at 1:08 PM
davey.bsky.social
Scoop: Reddit is in talks with Google to strike a new AI content deal—one that would get the platform paid more for its data, which has become crucial for training Google's AI & powering search results

w/ @rileyraygriffin.bsky.social & @shiringhaffary.bsky.social

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
Headline: Reddit seeks to strike next AI content pact with Google, OpenAI - Moving past a dollars-for-data model, Reddit seeks new deals - The social platform looks to bring new users into its forums Reddit Inc. is in early talks to strike its next content-sharing agreement with Alphabet Inc.’s Google, aiming to extract more value from future deals now that its data plays a prominent role in search results and generative AI training. Reddit, more than a year and a half after its first data-sharing deal with Google for a reported $60 million, is in talks for deeper integration with Google’s AI products, according to executives familiar with the discussions. It’s proposing a new kind of partnership that would encourage users to become active contributors to Reddit’s popular online forums, so Google traffic could help the company grow and generate content for future training.
September 17, 2025 at 3:58 PM
davey.bsky.social
As Mitch Stoltz of @eff.org told me, in the history of antitrust rulings over the past few decades, Mehta’s order on remedies could prove to have an even more minor impact than when Microsoft lost its antitrust case a quarter-century ago.

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
In the history of antitrust rulings over the past few decades, Mehta’s order on remedies could prove to have an even more minor impact than when Microsoft Corp. lost its antitrust case a quarter-century ago, said Mitch Stoltz, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who focuses on antitrust issues. “Even though the court didn’t order a breakup of the company following the appeals, I think the case overall had a really significant effect on Microsoft’s conduct,” he said. Some of the conduct remedies that were imposed on Microsoft ironically kept it from hobbling a younger Google 25 years ago, Stoltz argued. “This ruling, I think, is going to be less consequential than that,” he said. “I don’t think it will change Google’s corporate culture.”
September 3, 2025 at 9:48 PM
davey.bsky.social
Even the data-sharing idea was defanged to the point that it is unlikely to meaningfully help competitors, critics said. The details of the court order show how Mehta severely narrowed data-sharing remedies. Google will only have to share a one-time snapshot of its search data with some competitors.
Even the data-sharing idea was defanged to the point that it is unlikely to meaningfully help competitors, critics said. “A snapshot of Google’s search index and some query data will be helpful for competitors, including OpenAI, by giving them data that will improve their results,” said Yory Wurmser, an analyst with Emarketer. But Google hasn’t been compelled to reveal its more sensitive website and personal data that lets it provide tailored responses and run its massive advertising business. “So, it could give smaller competitors a needed boost, but it probably won’t undermine Google too much.” Data-sharing The details of the court order show how Mehta severely narrowed the idea of data-sharing to help competitors. Mehta denied the government’s request to compel Google to share its Knowledge Graph, a database that links people, places, and things to provide accurate search results. He also rejected the DOJ’s request for access to a wide range of data used for ad targeting, bidding and auction models. And while Google does have to share click-and-query data — the raw user data it collects after someone types something into a search bar and decides which results are helpful — the court said that it would cap the number of times the search giant had to disclose the information. Under the ruling, Google also doesn’t have to share key ranking signals in its search index, including those related to popularity, quality and authoritativeness. Instead of a periodic disclosure of search index data to competitors, Mehta simply ordered a one-time snapshot that must be provided to each qualified Google competitor. He rejected the request for data used to train Google’s generative AI models, finding that the AI market was highly competitive and “the evidence did not show…that Google’s GenAI product responses are superior to other GenAI offerings.”
September 3, 2025 at 9:46 PM
davey.bsky.social
Some expected Mehta to come down hard on Google, given his definitive finding of liability—that Google is a search monopolist. That original ruling, sources said, was surprising in its breadth and suggested a new approach to antitrust cases in the tech world. These remedies are a missed opportunity.
Bloomberg Law analyst Eleanor Tyler called the decision “terrible” in the judge’s refusal to actually attack the market imbalance. “We’re talking about a tech behemoth whose power is in the interlocking businesses,” she said. “He was clear about how bad things are, but then the ruling doesn’t do anything.” While Mehta ordered some data-sharing, “he brushed aside almost everything else the government asked for,” said Bill Kovacic, a former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission who now teaches antitrust at George Washington University Law School. “You can tell Mehta was worried about doing too much rather than too little. The race to prevail on AI overshadowed everything.”
September 3, 2025 at 9:42 PM
davey.bsky.social
Google's lobbyists are a major force in D.C., yet they're not at the top of the spending charts. A colleague has a great story explaining the workaround

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
A new analysis of federal lobbying data by the nonprofit Tech Transparency Project shows that Google and its parent company, Alphabet Inc. used an internal reorganization to exclude the value of lobbying by its senior executives from disclosures. The move helped keep Google off the top of the lobbying charts even as it maintained a robust network of advocates pushing its interests in the capital, during federal challenges to its dominance in search and advertising and the beginnings of artificial intelligence regulation. The findings, which were confirmed by a Bloomberg analysis of lobbying records, show that the effect of the accounting change was to lower the amount that Google reported spending to influence the federal government, likely by millions of dollars.
August 13, 2025 at 10:29 PM
davey.bsky.social
A little bit of news from me and @julialove.bsky.social: Google isn’t pushing through with its Quick View Recipe feature, which food bloggers had feared could erode their search traffic

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
Soon after news of the test program surfaced, creators made their concerns known, said Tomiko Harvey, a travel and food blogger at Passports and Grub, who attended a Google creator summit in May. “I’m actually feeling hopeful about this decision from Google,” Harvey wrote in an email. “Canceling the Quick View Recipe feature feels like a rare but welcome acknowledgment that creator feedback matters.” Although Google’s decision has some creators feeling relief, they likely haven’t seen the last of the search giant’s experimentation in a vibrant corner of the web. In recent years, many food bloggers have padded their recipes with lengthy preambles to ensure their content ranks well in Google Search, irritating readers in the process. As it crawls the web, Google will glean information about recipes’ core principles — say, the basic proportions of broth and meat in a recipe for chicken noodle soup — which it can then use to inform its own answers, Slater said. “Recipes are, by definition, facts, and facts are not copyrightable,” Slater said. For Google, “there’s always going to be a tension between giving the user exactly what they want,” he added, “and directing the user to another site.”
July 1, 2025 at 11:00 PM
davey.bsky.social
Stock is slowly ticking back up but still not looking great
May 20, 2025 at 5:58 PM
davey.bsky.social
the one and only @amandahess.bsky.social has written the most moving book about "having a child in the digital age"—but it's really about so much more. it's a meditation on the oppressiveness of tech, the fragility of humans, the miracle & bittersweetness of life... i would love for you to read it
April 25, 2025 at 6:56 PM
davey.bsky.social
New from me: Here's a fun lil earnings scoop 🚨

There was an $8 billion increase in profit in Alphabet's latest report that was just nagging and nagging at me. The accounting didn't make sense. Finally got to the bottom of it: the boost came from unrealized gains from a 2015 investment in SpaceX.
April 25, 2025 at 12:08 AM
davey.bsky.social
I remember when Twitter employees who criticized Musk on the platform and in meetings during the takeover period were fired, so... this tracks www.reuters.com/technology/a...
April 8, 2025 at 1:37 PM
davey.bsky.social
You can actually scroll to the right on this submenu, get to the “Web” tab, and just get the traditional list of links in results.

Now, do people do this consistently?… Will they take the time to?
April 7, 2025 at 10:34 PM
davey.bsky.social
In a recent interview with us, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai stressed that Google, through new efforts in search like AI Overviews, is focused on sending publishers “high-quality clicks.”

One publisher executive’s response: why does Google get to decide what a high-quality click is and what isn’t?
Google said the feature is an attempt to help users determine whether they are interested in a recipe before visiting a site. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai stressed in a recent interview that Google is focused on sending publishers high-quality clicks, or readers who genuinely want to visit their sites. But Danielle Coffey, president of the News Media Alliance, questioned whether Google is in a position to know what’s useful to publishers. “Why are they unilaterally deciding what is a high-quality click and how we should engage our readers when we’re the ones creating the content?” she said.
April 7, 2025 at 10:18 PM
davey.bsky.social
Google said it's changing search in response to new ways people consume information. It also said it's “misleading to make generalizations" about declining traffic “based on individual examples."

But we also offer a broader analysis, via Similarweb. We saw the same patterns bloom.bg/43Jmzk3
Google denied that the rollout of AI Overviews had harmed websites’ traffic, saying it was “misleading to make generalizations about the causes” of declining traffic “based on individual examples.” A spokesperson added that traffic can fluctuate for a number of reasons, including seasonal demand, users’ interests and regular algorithmic updates to search. But the traffic drops have been widely felt across the web and have spanned topics — fashion and lifestyle, travel, DIY and home design, and cooking, according to Bloomberg’s interviews and data from web-analytics firm Similarweb, which analyzed traffic to a sampling of small- to mid-sized websites in each of these categories over the past two years. It’s possible that AI Overviews were a factor, said Similarweb, which carried out the research at Bloomberg’s request.
April 7, 2025 at 10:15 PM
davey.bsky.social
In order to survive, these businesses have had to adjust. E.g, the owner of a site that had reviewed training shoes is now opening a brick-and-mortar store.

Others are testing new distribution routes, including YouTube—but that ultimately might be just as volatile as Google search bloom.bg/43Jmzk3
Dave Bouskill and Debra Corbeil, a Toronto-based couple, launched travel blog The Planet D in 2008. For the first few years, the pair relied on TV appearances and newspaper features to find readers, but in 2015 they woke up to the potential of Google Search, which eventually drove 90% of their traffic. Their luck ran out in 2024, when Google launched AI Overviews. In the first few months after the product’s introduction, Planet D’s traffic fell by half, and the pair watched their fellow travel bloggers go out of business one by one. Bouskill and Corbeil at first thought they’d be able to survive with a smaller business, but their readership continued to crater, forcing them to lay off staff. Finally, when traffic fell by 90% of prior levels and revenue almost as much, they decided to stop updating their blog. It’s been painful for them to watch Google’s AI Overviews parrot travel tips they once offered — especially when the chatbot borrows their Canadian slang. “I do feel betrayed by Google,” Bouskill said, as Corbeil interjected: “Betrayed, that’s the word.” To rebuild their livelihood, the couple has pivoted their efforts to YouTube, another Google-owned property.
April 7, 2025 at 7:38 PM
davey.bsky.social
We've heard some upsetting stories from publishers. One person relies on a food bank. Another experienced depression; they had to pull their kids out of expensive school commitments. Several sites have gone out of business entirely.

A couple of these sites are ones Google's bragged about in ads
At the October 2024 web creator meeting, Hardaker told Google’s chief search scientist, Pandu Nayak, that most of the group had struggled with little to no web traffic for more than a year, according to detailed notes of the event that were reviewed by Bloomberg. Hardaker himself had made $250,000 in gross revenue in 2023. But by the time of the meeting, he said he was relying on a food bank. “I need to know as a business owner, and personally, if you think there’s a chance that some of our sites have the ability to recover,” he said at the event. Nayak apologized, according to attendees. Then he said it wouldn’t be reasonable for him to make any guarantees to the publishers, because he couldn’t predict what would happen. A Google spokesperson said the creators invited to this event aren’t representative of the whole web creator ecosystem. But a larger analysis conducted by Similarweb of 67 small publisher sites, which included at least a dozen sites each across four topics — fashion and lifestyle, travel, DIY and home design, and cooking — found declines in web traffic in every category. Travel, which Google has recently rolled out robust AI features for, saw the most pronounced declines, according to the data. Google disputed Similarweb’s findings, saying the web traffic of this larger sample still doesn’t capture search traffic overall.
April 7, 2025 at 7:31 PM
davey.bsky.social
Another trend we uncovered: @housefresh.bsky.social shared internal Google search data with us. They believe that more people might be seeing their content within Google search via AI Overviews—but at the expense of users actually clicking through, which starves them of revenue. bloom.bg/43Jmzk3
Gisele Navarro, managing editor for the air purifier review site HouseFresh, said that based on internal web analytics, which she shared with Bloomberg, it appears more people are seeing her content via AI Overviews. But it’s happening at the expense of them clicking the link to visit her site. Sites don’t make money unless users click through and see ads or buy products. This same trend — more views of a website owner’s content on Google, but fewer clicks through to their sites — is occurring broadly, according to Nick Eubanks, a vice president at the digital marketing company Semrush Holdings Inc. He said AI Overviews is one of several factors that have contributed to this, and the trend would likely continue as summaries are shown for more queries.
April 7, 2025 at 7:25 PM
davey.bsky.social
A little scoop within the story: Google is beginning to test a new recipe feature that summarizes food bloggers' content directly in Google search too, with recipes appearing right up top results.

Creators who are participating in a pilot with Google are being directly compensated. bloom.bg/43Jmzk3
Google is making other changes to get its users answers without having to click through to a website. The company has begun testing a new recipe feature that summarizes food bloggers’ content directly in Google search. Creators who are participating in a pilot with Google are being directly compensated, but not nearly enough to offset declines in their advertising revenue, according to Marc McCollum, Raptive’s chief innovation officer. If the feature is implemented in full, Raptive estimates that traffic to food blogs would fall by half. The power dynamic between Google and individual creators is so lopsided that many publishers who were invited to participate in the recipe pilot felt they didn’t have much of a choice, said Lisa Bryan, the author of health-food site Downshiftology, who is not involved but is close with creators who are. “The big fear,” Bryan said, is that “Google is severing the relationship that we have with our communities and our audiences.” Google said the feature is an attempt to help users determine whether they are interested in a recipe before visiting a site.
April 7, 2025 at 7:21 PM
davey.bsky.social
NEW: Spoke to 25 small publishers about the kind of impact Google's AI changes to search has had on their businesses.

Things don't look good—not for the publishers, and not for the quality of information out on the open web, which ironically Google itself relies on.

Gift link: bloom.bg/43Jmzk3
In March 2024, website owner Morgan McBride was posing for photos in her half-renovated kitchen for a Google ad celebrating the ways the search giant had helped her family’s business grow. But by the time the ad ran about a month later, traffic from Google had fallen more than 70%, McBride said. Charleston Crafted, which features guides on do-it-yourself home improvement projects, had weathered algorithm changes and updates in the past; this time, it didn’t recover. McBride suspected people were getting more of their renovation advice from the artificial intelligence answers at the top of Google search. The now-ubiquitous AI-generated answers — and the way Google has changed its search algorithm to support them — have caused traffic to independent websites to plummet, according to Bloomberg interviews with 25 publishers and people who work with them. That’s disrupting a delicate symbiotic relationship that’s existed for years: if businesses create good content, Google sends them traffic.
April 7, 2025 at 3:38 PM
davey.bsky.social
what isn't in question is that many of google's moves are permanent. google told a group of publishers at a recent web creator summit last fall—who had all seen their traffic plummet—that search has fundamentally changed. so we'll continue to see the effects of generative AI in search unfold.
In October, Google convened a group of about 20 website creators at its Mountain View headquarters, in what it called the “Web Creator Conversation Event.” The company invited product reviewers, travel bloggers, and entertainment and lifestyle writers, and set up a series of meetings with its search engineers. “They told us that our content and our websites are exactly the kind of thing that Google wants to reward and that they need to do better,” says Gisele Navarro, the managing editor for HouseFresh, a website that specializes in in-depth reviews of air purifiers. The engineers asked the creators for tips on how to recognize when content was made by humans rather than generative AI, according to three people who were at the meeting. But Nayak, Google’s chief search scientist, also advised publishers to take advantage of AI tools to help them write content, they said. At one point an attendee pleaded with Google to roll back some of the updates it had made to search, arguing that it must want to remedy the harm it was doing to its partners. But Navarro remembers a Google engineer saying the company couldn’t make piecemeal adjustments to core changes to the algorithm. Since then some attendees have folded, and others are struggling to adjust. Google framed it as a broad conversation about the changing nature of search, but the message in the mind of at least some creators was starker, according to Navarro: “Something they told us in that meeting was to never expect to go back to our old levels of traffic,” she says, “because search has changed.”
March 25, 2025 at 5:04 PM
davey.bsky.social
there's a lot more in the story. but i think some of the most interesting reporting is in the way that Search is a reflection of the web, and also impacts the open web.

right now, i'd say the reporting bears out that the health of this ecosystem is at risk. bloom.bg/41W2wwl
Some of the strongest reactions are coming not from users but from that other core Google constituency: independent website publishers. Since it became big enough to matter, Google has been in a delicate dance with the people making the sites, videos and articles that its products help surface. The company has consistently—and accurately—described its search as a vital way for websites to attract new users. But it’s also steadily been providing more information on the search page itself, obviating the need for users to click through. Supporting publishers has always been incidental to Google’s larger aims, according to one former senior executive. “Giving traffic to publisher sites is kind of a necessary evil. The main thing they’re trying to do is get people to consume Google services,” the former executive says. “So there’s a natural tendency to want to have people stay on Google pages, but it does diminish the sort of deal between the publishers and Google itself.” Google contests this characterization, but AI Overviews may take it to its logical conclusion. Because Google’s AI is trained on the web, its answers are a kind of remixed version of the web itself, while also distorting the economy that gave rise to the modern internet by potentially cutting the sites out of the equation entirely.
March 25, 2025 at 5:02 PM
davey.bsky.social
but there has long been tension between the preferences of google users who want to get information quickly, and the needs of websites that produce that information. some googlers wrestled with that tension.
Googlers were well aware of the tension between the preferences of users, who liked getting information quickly, and the needs of websites that produced that information. “I don’t know what the right answer is,” Cornet says. “I would say that, at least as an employee, I felt like the focus on the user was a good enough reason for me to think that Google wasn’t trying to do anything nefarious—even though it may put some companies out of business.” On the flip side, Google’s business model also supported services that were distinctly not useful for users but were tuned to extract ad revenue, like scammy product affiliate sites and clickbaity news aggregators. Within the past several years blog posts began appearing about the declining quality of Google Search. Users started trying to avoid low-quality sites with tricks such as appending the term “Reddit” to their queries in the hope of locating threads where the information was coming from real people.
March 25, 2025 at 5:01 PM
davey.bsky.social
one other former employee told us that it was relaxing to work on a product that had such an assured future.

at times, engineers even worked on projects that they knew wouldn't get launched.

at times, though, rank-and-filers felt like google was moving way too slowly.
Other times they toiled on projects they knew were pointless. In 2020 a former Google manager was charged with helping a team of dozens of engineers who were working on a project to make web search infrastructure more efficient. About six months in, a vice president let slip that he had no intention of releasing the project. But he advised the manager to keep going so the engineers would have something to show their bosses at the end of the year. Not everyone at Google hated such assignments. One former employee says people sometimes found it relaxing to work on projects for which everyone knew the stakes were low. But the barriers to introducing products hurt morale among engineers and sparked tension between management and rank-and-filers. In 2021, Manu Cornet, a search engineer who was also Google’s resident cartoonist, captured the dynamic by sketching an image of a massive cargo ship with cannons, towers and cranes grafted on top of an aging hull patched with duct tape. Surveying the horizon from the deck, the captain remarks, “Poor execution speed. The rowers need a culture shift.”
March 25, 2025 at 4:58 PM