How does this work for Google? I read it costs them $0.001 to perform a search. No matter how efficient their inference chips are, the new cost basis has to be 10X or more. And the zero click Internet not only kills ad supported content sites, it also kills Google SERP ad revenues.
I fear what is coming is integrated ads into the conversation. What has Google to gain from helping discover sites that don't sell anything that can be advertised?
I imagine sites will have to be increasingly behind crawlers protection (like cloud flare) and make Google pay for agents visiting it.
They enabled this for me several days ago, and is awful. I don’t need slop explaining me the name of the API variable I am searching for, I need links to docs with possible values! And if you try to ask in a more “human” language - it will hallucinate like hell. Fortunately, I found that search from address bar still gets me into usual search.
I wonder if some competitor will just stick with classic search and peel off some users from Alphabet. Seems that could be fairly popular. Yahoo make a comeback!
Makes me sad. I recall the beginnings of Google, so hopeful so new.
Now they are a money printing corporate. I am sure there are still people there doing new and exciting things, but the Grey Suits have taken the reigns
They could have used AI to make that awesome simple sparse home page better. Fought off the SEO optimiser that made search so dire in the recent past
But no. They are doubling down on bling and crap. SEO is good for business.
Still seems to work quite well for me. Some of the new stuff is quite handy especially the lens thing built into Chrome so you can search images as well as text.
How does a media company stay in business when there is no one visiting the site, and people are only getting the quality information from Google?
Advertising on the media site (assuming digital media, no physical media) is going to disappear because people probably won't be clicking through to read the source material that the Google AI answer relied on. No traffic, no advertisers, no money to produce the original journalism. That's going to impact the Google results eventually as these media outlets shut down to be replaced with...AI slop, maybe?
Is the subscriber model the answer? It could work for a niche subject or a single journalist with a following, and it wouldn't be sucked into Google results, either, if it was effectively gated/paywalled.