[tndibona]

My personal opinion. Google sees the writing on the wall with the rise of perplexity. People want trustable summaries of long winding content to make decisions. It’s business of sending people to the relevant content and serving ads has to change to compete. It is simply redefining how it serves up information. The fact that small information servers like us get wiped out is the unfortunate consequence.

I’m not saying we all have to innovate or perish but how did our rules based order allow Google to get to this point.

[sumtechguy]

Basically if you serve information or content. AI or even just some smart coding google can do that too. If you do something with that information Google has not been doing so good at that.

Microsoft in the early 2000s did that very well. They would let you have the data but would gobble up any company that could transform data and make it their own.

But data without applications is useless. Applications without data is also useless.

The applications let us make decisions with our data. Now can AI replace that? Probably in many cases. If it ican then google can just spit out the answer you want.

However, by doing that google may be eating its own lunch. As that ad empire depends on thousands of websites serving up their ad's. If those sites do not exist then what are the ads worth? It was this serving of information/content that drew everyone in. With that scrape of getting ad revenue. Google now can scrape your content and show it above the fold. What reason do you have to make a content farm? But then where does google get the data? They are killing the chicken and the egg at the same time.

[tndibona]

I see your point, data is no good without actions and vice versa. Initially, I thought google couldn't possibly compete with perplexity because they are building a company from the ground up sans the surveillance ad-network.

If you skim the article this thread is about, It seems google is basically headed to create a monopoly on the answers being dished out to search queries. I.e, if they know the answer they'll generate & serve it up, but if they know the product that fulfills your answer, they will serve that up too. They will probably still continue to monitor you across the web to run their predictions for relevant ads. It will just be formatted and blended with the answer being doled out.

I think we are in the middle of this transformation.

[sumtechguy]

> I think we are in the middle of this transformation.

Totally. Had a bit to think on my second point. Lets say I used to do something like 'who was the king of england in 1732'. That would in the past may lead me thru at least 3 websites. All serving ads. Now google can have that above the fold. They will have some ad's on the side like they always did. But I have the thing I want. I am probably not going to drill onto those other sites. Seeing those ad's too. Ads more than likely being served by google. In effect it will be showing me something like 80% less ad's. I am pretty cool with that. But the ecosphere around it is going to collapse or at least be substantially curtailed. This will also subtract on what they can charge for ad's. As they will be serving less of them.

[tndibona]

So if I take both your points - 1. Google will have to eat it's own lunch in order to force this change. 2. They will also have to skim down their Ad space as there will just be less content real estate to place ads when the way forward is an AI style Q&A type search.

Google will have pivot, and trim its bloat to effectuate this change. This will be at the expense of "Maximising shareholder value"?

[FinnLobsien]

> I’m not saying we all have to innovate or perish but how did our rules based order allow Google to get to this point.

Well millions of people learned how to game the Google Search algorithm and created long-winded, hollow content that would rank on the first page to the point that people no longer trusted Google's results.

Then the perfect technology to solve that exact problem came along—one that let Google cease its dependency on the pesky people it was sending traffic to.

[tndibona]

Yes, this is true that all the click bait and unoriginal content deserves to perish. But, what about the carve outs for people putting money on original content. Like perhaps a local news gazette with paid journalists. They need google to be found, they also can't afford to get scraped and be AI-regurgitated up.

Let's take a practical example, if you searched for let's say "Whats the latest research on intermittent fasting and its effect on weight loss?". Google could easily AI-summarise a DOAC podcast on this topic and serve it up. How is this fair to Steven Bartlett who put the money and time on an interview podcast? He is deprived of a potential subscriber, lost out potential ad revenue, cant recover his cost. The youtube network he depends on is owned by Google. Seems a bit unfair to genuine people.

[FinnLobsien]

Yeah I totally agree! But I think it's a reaction on Google's part to the SEO industry. I mourn the loss of independent media, blogosphere etc. and the trend to everything being either more generic or more outrageous.

[tndibona]

Yep. This SEO industry is a result of "Lets hack the pagerank algorithm". Maybe a sensible use of AI for google would be to use it to differentiate between genuine and derivative content. Drop the page rank based search.