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The tricky thing for Google will be to do this and not kill their cash cow ad business.
Liberating me from "search clicks" is not a bad thing at all. I suspect many of us though don't even go to anyway but ask an LLM directly.
It's fundamentally self-destructive though. In time, the sites which rely on search clicks for revenue will essentially cease to be paid for their work, and in many cases will therefore stop publishing the high-quality material that you're looking for.
Google search, as others have mentioned in this thread, increasingly fails to give me high-quality material anyway. Mostly it's just pages of SEO spam. I prefer that the LLM eat that instead of me (just spit back up the relevant stuff, thankyouverymuch).
Honestly though, increasingly the internet for me is 1) a distraction from doing real work 2) YouTube (see 1) and 3) a wonderful library called archive.org (which, if I could grab a local snapshot would make leaving the internet altogether much, much easier).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a weird goal to me. Like, what's their end game here? Offer to manipulate the AI responses for ad money? Product placement in the summaries? I would hope those placements have to be disclosed as advertising, and it would immediately break trust in anything their AI outputs so surely that would only continue to harm them in the long run, no? ~57% of their revenue is from search advertising. How do they plan on re…
So youd be surprised and scared - the Ad PMs I know are totally salivating at this. Their angle is "SEO is no more - it is GEO now". GenAI Engine Optimization. Welcome to the Futurama Internet Future!
Seriously, Futurama and Cyberpunk and 1984 were all supposed to be warnings... not how-to manuals.
The overviews are also wrong and difficult to get fixed. Google AI has been listing incorrect internal extensions causing departments to field calls for people trying to reach unrelated divisions and services, listing times and dates of events that don't exist at our addresses that people are showing up to, and generally misdirecting and misguiding people who really need correct information from a truth source like o…
I subscribe to Kagi. It's been worth it to have no ads and the ability to uprank/downrank sites. And there's no AI garbage sitting in the top of the engine.
I'm more interested now than ever. A lot of my time spent searching is for obscure or hard-to-find stuff, and in the past smaller search engines were useless for this. But most of my searches are quick and the primary thing slowing me down are Google product managers. So maybe Kagi is worth a try?
Which is of course Google’s short-sighted goal. See also their push to switch to full “AI mode” search which doesn’t show results at all.
It's a weird goal to me. Like, what's their end game here? Offer to manipulate the AI responses for ad money? Product placement in the summaries? I would hope those placements have to be disclosed as advertising, and it would immediately break trust in anything their AI outputs so surely that would only continue to harm them in the long run, no? ~57% of their revenue is from search advertising. How do they plan on re…
I've seen blatantly wrong stuff in that overview too many times, I just ignore it now.
To be fair, the actual results are often even worse. I'm pretty sure we're close to the point where our favorite AI prompt replaces classic googling. While it will get a lot of the answer wrong, it will lead to the right result faster than plain searches. If nothing else, because refining our search at the AI prompt will be way easier than in classic google. Google knows and needs to stay on top of this paradigm chan…
I subscribe to Kagi. It's been worth it to have no ads and the ability to uprank/downrank sites. And there's no AI garbage sitting in the top of the engine.
You can opt-in to get an LLM response by phrasing your queries as a question. Searching for “who is Roger rabbit” gives me Wikipedia, IMDb and film site as results. Searching for “who is Roger rabbit?” gives me a “quick answer” LLM-generated response: “Roger Rabbit is a fictional animated anthropomorphic rabbit who first appeared in Gary K. Wolf's 1981 novel…” followed by a different set of results. It seems the resu…
In your case, I think that it is just the interrogation point in itself at the end that somehow has an impact on the results you see.
The tricky thing for Google will be to do this and not kill their cash cow ad business.