Google under Sundar Pichai is a terrible company that only succeeds based on its size and monopoly. Let's be honest, they're saying that search results will become secondary as they push their service. How do you, as a CEO and board, sign off on an idea that kills most of your (ad) revenue pursuing something that you haven't even figured out how to monetize? Make it make sense.
search results will become secondary as they push their service
Oh, so they're gonna emphasize less on search results and more onto their half-arsed services that they're axing from time to time? This is so Google of them.
The sooner, the better. It's so painful when I use Google these days. Why is it that smaller people can do seemingly obvious features like custom user-controlled site rankings, but the big players are completely incapable of that?
Why is it that smaller people can do seemingly obvious features like custom user-controlled site rankings, but the big players are completely incapable of that?
Because that would give control to the user. And we all know they hate us having that because they can't shove their shit down our throats then
Generative AI is so energy intensive ($$$), that Google is requiring users subscribe to Gemini.
Google is entirely dependent on advertising sales. Ad revenue subsidizes literally everything else, from Android development to whichever 8-12 products and services they launch and subsequently cancel each year.
Now, Google wants to remove web results and just use generative AI instead of search as it's default user interface.
While I agree in principle, one thing I’d like to clarify is that TRAINING is super energy intensive, once the network is trained, it’s more or less static. Actually using the network isn’t dramatically more energy than any other indexed database lookup.
It's static, yes, but the static price is orders of magnitude higher. It still involves loading the whole model into VRAM and performing matrix multiplication on trillions of numbers
If you haven't already, folks, switch your default search engine over to a searx. You'll gain back the ability to actually find useful results. It's not so good for shopping, though.
Site owners haven't figured that out yet. They still cling to the notion that search optimization works. And it still does, to some extent.
Like, if you're a small business owner providing local services in your city and you get customers that find you through Google, what can you do except continue to optimize for Google?
True. In your example, that makes sense. In cases where like newspaper/ journalism that earns ads revenue when ppl visit their articles, they will eventually lose those ads revenue when Gemini answers everything. But as u said, if they don't let google to crawl, they lose ads revenue now. Tough choice.
honestly i don't think this is too big a deal - search has always been more than just results like when you could enter in an equation and get a calculator widget or currency exchange.
i do think that stagnation has hit tech companies as a whole and i think google is suffering because of it. google i/o's and android used to be so exciting now it just feels like they're going through the motions (apple suffers from this too).
I would argue the opposite. These big companies have discovered what they believe to be the Holy Grail of technology (generative AI) and are now in a race unlike any seen before to deploy it as quickly as possible to the world and gain market dominance. Big tech is completely out of control right now, even the CEOs are describing it as "frantic" behind the scenes.
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The feature, renamed "AI Overview," is here now, and it feels like the biggest change to Google Search ever.
When Google decides you have an AI-appropriate query, it now takes a lot of scrolling to see web results.
Page three is the bottom half of the video box, then a "Discussions and forums" section with Reddit and Quora posts.
Google claims "that the links included in AI Overviews get more clicks than if the page had appeared as a traditional web listing for that query," but that's honestly hard to believe.
When Google takes the content from one or several sites, rearranges it with AI, and displays it, in full, at the top of the results, why would any user click through?
Assuming AI overview works the same way, Google has not said how it expects something like this to be sustainable for web publishers.