And yet, 25 years on, Google Search faces a series of interlocking AI-related challenges that together represent an existential threat to Google itself.
The first is a problem of Google’s own making: the SEO monster has eaten the user experience of search from the inside out. Searching the web for information is an increasingly user-hostile experience, an arbitrage racket run by search-optimized content sharks running an ever-changing series of monetization hustles with no regard for anything but collecting the most pennies at the biggest scale. AI-powered content farms focused on high-value search terms like heat-seeking missiles are already here; Google is only now catching up, and its response to them will change how it sends traffic around the web in momentous ways.
That leads to the second problem, which is that chat-based search tools like Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s own Bard represent something that feels like the future of search, without any of the corresponding business models or revenue that Google has built up over the past 25 years. If Google Search continues to degrade in quality, people will switch to better options — a switch that venture-backed startups and well-funded competitors like Microsoft are more than happy to subsidize in search of growth, but which directly impacts Google’s bottom line. At the same time, Google’s paying tens of billions annually to device makers like Apple and Samsung to be the default search engine on phones. Those deals are up for renewal, and there will be no pity for Google’s margins in these negotiations.
Search on the web is in a terrible state right now. Searching for anything on Google is a horrible experience, with results riddled with ads and an endless stream of SEO’d garbage content of low to no quality. Alternatives, such as DuckDuckGo, aren’t much better, and tend to promote garbage anti-science and fascist nonsense if you’re not careful enough. At this point I just don’t know what to use to find stuff on the web, and tend to just go straight to sites that I think have the best odds of containing a relevant result (e.g. going straight to Reddit when dealing with some obscure bug or software issue).
I know there are even smaller competitors, but I don’t hold high hopes they can offer the same breadth as Google once did, or even DuckDuckGo sometimes does now. It’s not looking pretty out there.
I have felt the impact of SEO when I search for solutions to tech issues and articles that appear useful but actually try to sell you a useless software utility show up, but still, Google is fighting the issue and most of the results I see are useful, and even the SEO’ed articles have to include at least some helpful text (copied and pasted from somewhere else obv) in order to appear on the first page.
In my opinion, Google’s biggest issue is increased tech literacy, which means people are slowly learning it’s not a good idea to click on weird links on banner ads and it’s better to search for the company’s name online instead (and if there is no company name mentioned on the banner ad, then that’s a major red flag). This threatens Google’s pay-per-click model, which is Google’s biggest cash cow. Which means Google will inevitably have to move to “impression-based” ads (where the entity being advertised pays per impression, not per click think YouTube ads), which means they’ll have to convince their clientele that the change is worth it. Up until now, Google has convinced their clientele that clicks means new customers, despite numerous studies showing this is not the case, now they have to somehow convince them that impressions means new customers after spending years badmouthing the model.
About ChatGPT, it’s a nice toy, but not actually useful when looking for answers to questions, because it will give you a wrong answer with the same confidence and authoritativeness as when giving a correct answer, especially on technical questions. For example, I asked it “Can xHE-AAC be decoded by AAC-LC players?” and it gave me an answer suitable to HE-AAC v2, which means it could be wrong, and I can’t judge the quality of the answer by weighing up the quality of the sources, because there are no sources, the entire text is a secretion of ChatGPT’s multi-level weighted
text-mincerneural network in the clouds.Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1838/
>Alternatives, such as DuckDuckGo, aren’t much better, and tend to promote garbage anti-science and fascist nonsense if you’re not careful enough.
What if someone is searching for that though? A search engine should be a tool, not a journalist.
>What if someone is searching for that though? A search engine should be a tool, not a journalist.
Possibly. I suspect the answer is to show the search results, but clearly flag them as false.
sloth,
Yeah, but I’m hesitant to declare search engines the arbitrators of truth. Their primary mission is to generate money for the owners, which unfortunately isn’t the same as promoting accurate content
I consider search engines to me more like a librarian, it’s one thing to be good at finding information but another altogether to have the expertise to judge it. I’ve even seen conjecture asserted as fact on wikipedia by editors. This is extremely hard to solve and IMHO I don’t think search engines are equipped to do so. I’d rather they simply be transparent with their mechanisms open for all to see. However I realize this is anything but the case today, they couldn’t be more opaque.
Wtf are people looking for to end up with anti-science, and fascist stuff on DuckDuckGo? I haven’t used Google for ages because it inevitably gives me garbage results. It has been more than a decade, unless I am searching for like a very specific filename or something extremely obscure.
Then again the main things I search for are computer related things. Or other hobby type stuff. Perhaps I just watch the absurdity from far enough away from people that I only see it on YouTube.
leech,
I don’t know, Thom’s probably not going to clarify.
I agree. I think google has the advantage of a large deep index that competitors can’t match. But as far as search technology itself, I don’t find google search to be all that special.
It’s funny that you should say that. Most video content I watch is on youtube and I couldn’t believe how much propaganda was being recommended by the platform during past elections. Obviously it says something about tech companies promoting content that maximizes engagement rather than wholesome content, but OMG I got so sick of it. Boy do I hate google’s obsession with click baity channels. I realize it’s a reflection of what drives engagement because it works, but I still hate that youtube gets spammed with so much of it while good content is drowned out.
I’ve noticed that in more recent years youtube will link to more authoritative sites under a video whenever certain topics like covid are mentioned in the video, but they’re still promoting too much low quality spam for my liking, often leading to such videos having millions of views.
All Google needs to do is wait until MS just cannot help themselves and start aggressively monetizing their AI chat by turning it into hightec snake oil salesman. The potential is just too tempting before next board meeting to be passed by and the mounting server farm costs will have to be amortized sooner or later.
LLMs and stuff will have a dramatic impact on job market place but I’m sure MS will just screw the search part as always.
search engines used to be useful for general purpose after altavista onwards. Now they are worse than pagin through a book most of the times. The wrong answers are promoted, usually. I live in northern sweden and really like birds and their migration patterns. I love proving google wikimedia sources wrong as “never seen in the boreal zone” is usually complete bullshit. Not by arguing, just by posting a video asking: “one of these?” filming the little buggars.
What works for me is heavy usage of +site: … OR +site: …. etc., limiting the search for a set of trusted domains. I would happily subscribe (maybe anyone knows such a service?) for distributed list of trusted domains, a bit like adblockers use lists of advertisements.