Google destroys their own search engine by encouraging terrible SEO nonsense and then offers the solution in the form of these AI overviews, cutting results out of the picture entirely.
You search something on the Web nowadays half the results are written by AI anyway.
I don’t really care about the “human element” or whatever, but AI is such a hype train right now. It’s still early days for the tech, it still hallucinates a lot, and I fundamentally can’t trust it—even if I trusted the people making it, which I don’t.
Google was already going downhill but when they fired Matt Cutts and replaced him with an advertising person was the point where it was obvious they weren’t interested in search anymore.
You will never be able to consistently find the truth when AI optimizes for overfitting to get any result as long as something is show with ads next to it.
AI has no way of understanding truth. It’s autocomplete trained on just anything it can find truth or not.
AI can also understand extra weights for hand picked sources of truth. Whether you then agree with the choices of whoever is doing the hand picking, is a separate matter.
Would be a shame if different “truths” made more or less money and someone optimized for one of those.
Yeah, they call it A-Z testing, because A/B wasn’t enough, and AIs can fill A to Z cases with ease.
Google said, “yo, we heard you liked search, so we gave you AI with a slither of search and we will ram it down your throat until you feel like you can’t live without it, because walled gardens are the best and we can’t figure out a way to trap you in ours” 🥴
Large language models are going to replace search. Naturally concise recommendations are easier for humans to interact with than a swath of web pages. The problem that you get here is this is going to disincentive the creation of new web content outside of the walled gardens we already have. The walls are just going to get higher.
Google will be sued again by the big publications and will pay out. But little independent publications will die as people get used to not leaving the search engine.
The appeal to google and friends is that it’s even less obvious when you’re being advertised to when a LLM tells you something than on their existing SERPs.
💯
Oh good, now when I search I’ll have to wade through the effluent of AI-produced pablum to find an actual human journalism product.
Bold of you to assume you’ll find an actual human journalism product
I wish more people would care about monopolies fucking up the infrastructure of our internet.
Government needs to give a shit instead of taking their money and doing nothing.
Google has been unusable in English for at least 2 years now. Searching in Estonian makes Google behave like it did when it was still good. I wonder how long that’s going to last.
BRB, gonna learn Estonian.
See on väärt oskus, meid on lausa tosinaid!
how seo game this? the sooner you start…
And layoffs all the way down.
Yes please. Shoot yourself in the foot. It seems like it’s the only way people will even consider switching.
I wish they undid a lot of their stupid redesigns instead of doubling down on it.
I’m getting Pixel 8a ads and I usually trade-in my older a if I start having problems or the new one has a feature. 8a finally has wireless charging (7 mightve, was too soon) but it has this bullshit now. Damnit.
I’d like to check in as part of the problem; I pay for google ads and I show up at the top of certain search screens. I’m in a small local market, and google is primed to make about $350,000 off about $3mm of work this year if things keep up the way they are. We have no choice but to play the game to reach our consumers. Sorry guys.
Nope nope nope
