In screenwriting, there is a well-honed idea that main characters should want one thing, but need something different, something that is often opposed to or even opposite their most public desires.

They are blind to what they need the most, and often purposefully so, having shoved those feelings down juuuuust about as far as they can go. Trust me when I say: having a long hard look at yourself isn’t easy, or comfortable.

So we empathize with these characters because, I mean, who amongst us, right?

It’s an imperfect character development mechanism, of course. The best characters aren’t that simple, and none of us are, either.

That said, history is littered with memorable characters who reluctantly go through transformations, who finally walk away from what they want and go through hell to get what they needed all along, letting us experience what it’s like to have that long hard look without actually having to, you know, do it.

Web search was intended to give us what we need, but over time the utility has been hijacked to give us what we want.

We need a real answer, but at this point search most often gives us what we want — self-affirmation — and if it’s delivered by a paid advertisement that looks just like a real answer, that’s even better.

That process, over and over, billions of times a day, leads to disinformation. Sometimes disinformation hurts one person, as we’ll see below, but at scale disinformation inevitably hurts many, many people.

Imagining that search could ever give us entirely objective answers, all of the time, ignores the web’s original sin — the web is only what we put into it, and we are fundamentally flawed.

The internet is so fundamentally broken that we desperately want the next thing — AI chatbots — to be everything, all at once.

But that’s even more dangerous because instead of your question returning a list of links ranked by Google, most of which are now paid ads, or a newsfeed of extreme views from friends and family on Facebook, a chatbot is an extremely convincing version of both.

It’s incredibly confident, and often very wrong. But we can’t tell the difference, and I’m not sure we want to.

I’m not going to spend today’s essay assessing the technological capabilities of search or new large language models, because that assessment will be old news almost immediately.

What I do want to do is try to force us to confront our wants and needs, to confront our expectations, borne of who we are — a construct that has remained the same for eons and underpins every single system we’ve ever built.

Recently, a startling piece of information came to light in the ongoing antitrust case against Google. During one employee’s testimony, a key exhibit momentarily flashed on a projector. In the mostly closed trial, spectators like myself have only a few seconds to scribble down the contents of exhibits shown during public questioning.

Thus far, witnesses had dropped breadcrumbs hinting at the extent of Google’s drive to boost profits: a highly confidential effort called Project Mercury, urgent missives to “shake the sofa cushions” to generate more advertising revenue on the search engine results page (SERP), distressed emails about the sustained decline in the ad-triggering searches that generate most of Google’s money, recollections of how the executive team has long insisted that obscene corporate profit equals consumer good.

Now, the projector screen showed an internal Google slide about changes to its search algorithm.

This onscreen Google slide had to do with a “semantic matching” overhaul to its SERP algorithm. When you enter a query, you might expect a search engine to incorporate synonyms into the algorithm as well as text phrase pairings in natural language processing. But this overhaul went further, actually altering queries to generate more commercial results.

Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations.

Here’s how it works. Say you search for “children’s clothing.” Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear,” making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren’t searching for at all. It’s not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don’t get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time.

This is a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape.