Thanks, Google.

But not really.

I haven’t seen many movies in theaters in 2025 but I have seen Friendship twice. If you haven’t heard of Friendship, you’re probably not in the target audience for it.

But this is not a review of that movie. I’ve come here not to praise Friendship, but to write about the frightening things I saw in a Google result when I tried to find out when it will be released on streaming services.

“friendship streaming”

I began by typing “friendship streaming” into the search bar. Then I saw this:

While the stuff on the left is typical junk—no date of when it will begin streaming, which is all I wanted, and Google still thinking that HBO Max is named “Max”—it’s the stuff on the right that is the true nightmare.

Take a close look at those cited sources on the right. You might even be able to find them right now if you google “friendship streaming”, because I’ve managed to replicate this result several times today. Here’s a screenshot I took seconds ago:

What is this, you ask? Well, it’s exactly what it looks like:

1. An apparently hacked URL on a dot gov website. Specifically, a subdomain on the City of Pittsburgh website. Good news is that it’s 404ing, so they either fixed it or the hack broke it.

2. A Yahoo article.

3. A PDF on the apparently hacked Pathology subdomain on the WashU website.

Do you want proof of that third result? Yes, I clicked it. I had to know. Here you go:

Yep. That’s pretty bad.

Good news is that the City of Pittsburgh seems to have already corrected their issue.

Why am I sharing all of this? I guess I just have some questions. Questions like:

• How is Google still in the lead?

• Who do I know who has abandoned it?

• What have you replaced it with?

• Is Google holding its position through the inertia of its users?

• Should I email the WashU webmaster to let them know of this? (Yes, probably.)

“Stay curious, Craig Waterman.”

This does bring me back to Friendship, the movie I saw twice and might see a third time in theaters. There’s a running line in it:

“Stay curious.”

This seems relevant as we watch the tech giants disrupt away the truth they were known for. We’re all going to have to stay curious as we figure what platforms and sources we can still trust.

Because I’m increasingly convinced that Google is compromised and it won’t be coming back.

And I think I’ll end on a Tim Robinson note:

p.s. if anyone has the contact info for anyone at WashU, let me know. I’m starting to worry about them.

p.p.s. I do hope “Thanks, Google” is something people increasingly say when we see this kind of garbage.