Earlier today, Google presented a new vision for its flagship search engine, one that is uniquely tailored to the generative-AI moment. With advanced technology at its disposal,
Google will do the Googling for you, Liz Reid, the company’s head of search, declared onstage at the company’s annual software conference.Googling something rarely yields an immediate, definitive answer. You enter a query, confront a wall of blue links, open a zillion tabs, and wade through them to find the most relevant information. If that doesn’t work, you refine the search and start again. Now Google is rolling out “AI overviews” that might compile a map of “anniversary worthy” restaurants in Dallas sorted by ambience (live music, rooftop patios, and the like), comb recipe websites to create meal plans, structure an introduction to an unfamiliar topic, and so on.
Generative AI, then, is in some ways providing a return to what Google Search was before the company infused it with product marketing and snippets and sidebars and Wikipedia extracts—all of which have arguably contributed to the degradation of the product. The AI-powered searches that Google executives described didn’t seem like going to an oracle so much as a more pleasant version of Google: pulling together the relevant tabs, pointing you to the most useful links, and perhaps even encouraging you to click on them.
Matteo Wong
My gut reaction to AI Overviews was: welp, so rather than rooting out listicles and low-grade content farms, Google has embraced them, featuring its own aggregated AI-answers on its front page!
The article above tries to put a positive spin on the whole endeavor, but I fail to see a reflection of original Google in this trend. In fact, I would say that this variant of AI-Google is diametrically opposed to their stated mission of organizing the world’s information. Call me old-fashioned, but I think valuable information should be verifiable and as close to the truth as possible; stringing words together to form plausible sentences divorced from reality is meaningless. And yet, that’s the product Google is now offering: here are some snippets that feel right, with no assurance that they are at all true or even come from an identifiable source.
Google AI overview suggests adding glue to get cheese to stick to pizza, and it turns out the source is an 11 year old Reddit comment from user F*cksmith 😂 pic.twitter.com/uDPAbsAKeO
— Peter Yang (@petergyang) May 23, 2024
The only way this Google soaked in AI is like its roots is that its ad-centered business model is up in the air. No matter how much Sundar Pichai reassures us that AI Overviews has high clickthrough rates and that ads are still part of the strategy, it’s unclear how things will actually play out. I am reasonably certain that most people are less likely to click through to the source if they can get the whole answer in an AI Overview; and cramming ads in there defeats the whole idea of cleanness.
News publishers and smaller creators will certainly take a hit; and the idea of taxing Google to fund the news industry will probably pick up pace. Some publishers could start blocking Google’s regular crawlers if their referral traffic drops considerably, eroding the quality of the original link-based search results even further. On the bright side, declining ad revenues would be a sure way to make Google reconsider these AI-generated results. And perhaps with Google distracted by their efforts in generative AI, other companies could step in and offer new search products and ranking algorithms, providing much needed and overdue competition in this area.
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