Does it seem, I'm not sure, ironic maybe? That the main example here is "An app that writes blog posts" - "Researches a topic and writes a blog post about it" - that the company who helped champion the network effects of the internet and surface truly useful search results is now helping to destroy that very same thing they built their entire business on?

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CobrastanJorji 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Different teams. This AI team at Google cares not for the health of the web. They barely remember that Google has a search engine, except of course for the groudbreaking AI search results which are responsible for many large numbers for use in annual reviews. This team's goal is to sell their AI solution, and if that means demonstrating its ability to generate tools that create crap content that harms the search engine results, well, I'm sure another AI solution can probably combat that later.

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input_sh an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Google Search has like 10 years of history of doing its best not to get you to click on a search result, but to answer your question directly or at the very least keep you on their platform while screwing over website owners.

The first two iteration of this were AMP and Instant Answers, the third one is AI Overview. AI Overview should not be seen in isolation, but as a part of the pattern. If it weren't for it, Google would double down on some other method of reaching the same goal.

This one will end up the same way the other two did: there's gonna be a vocal minority that's gonna consider it unfair and a web killer, the vast majority of users won't have an opinion, Google will not care, "the web" will play along, those early adopters are temporarily gonna have an advantage in this "new age" and some will die in the process, but the vast majority is gonna continue on as if nothing happened.

It's also not gonna be the final iteration of this process because shiny new things sound better to investors than marginal improvements, so X years from now AI Overview is gonna be seen as something "old-fashioned", Google Search will pivot once again, and the rest of the web will follow to keep Google happy.

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memoriuaysj an hour ago | parent [-]

you know, there is a third group - a large number of users which find the AI overview useful

	▲	input_sh 18 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> the vast majority of users won't have an opinion They're here, they don't care how they get from point A to point B, the tech used to achieve that result is completely irrelevant to them. AI? Great. Not AI such as the Instant Answers era? Also great. Average Joe does not spend his time thinking about the economics of the web. But you shouldn't confuse them finding "AI" useful now with them being attached to it long term. It's a hip new tool now, but the novelty will fade and Google will have to re-invent themselves all over again. If anything, they kinda screwed themselves over by calling this "AI". AI is supposed to be something within reach, but always some years away. By wasting that term for the current era, it's gonna suck so hard to think of a new marketing term that's gonna be seen as an improvement in comparison to the term "AI".
	▲	touwer an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Very large even. Especially considering the explosion of ai-crap in the search results
	▲	irl_zebra 32 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yeah hate to say it, because I am an AI hater, but I love the AI results in Google and Kagi. I barely click results anymore for basic questions unless it's something important enough for me to need verification to ensure the AI-gen answer wasn't a hallucination. It's been so nice not having to pick through the cesspool that is StackOverflow to find answers to quick cli questions, or wade through SEO-generated, Amazon-affiliate link garbage for more general questions.

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troupo 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> This AI team at Google cares not for the health of the web. They barely remember that Google has a search engine

Neithet do any teams at Google, including the search teams. Google is an ad company with 80% of its revenue coming from ads. They couldn't give two shits about the health of the web.

The man who killed Google search was a minor hit when it was published: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

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oneeyedpigeon 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That contradicts the long-standing claim that Google does care about as many people using as good a WWW as possible. A ghost town has plenty of ad space, but not much ad revenue.

	▲	troupo an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Don't look at what a company claims. Look at what the company does.

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faust201 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

By that logic no company cares about anything but profits.

	▲	troupo an hour ago \| parent [-]
		How is this surprising? The absolute vast majority of companies care about nothing but profits. As for Google, what I wrote was literally spelled out in their own emails uncovered in court proceedings.

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cdata 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Arguably the ad business is to blame. It created a perverse incentive. They maximized pay-to-play. The losers were authors that previously published on a passion budget (and would/could never pay for ads). AI is just the last nail in the coffin.

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luigi23 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I dont think so. They also triggered SEO race where businesses pump out same bland blogposts to optimize ranking. Content made by humans for those companies was the only viable way at that time, and now new synthetic method emerges - whatever generates revenue will win. AI reels and tiktoks get views, so why bother with human generated content after the training on models have been done? Sad but true.

	▲	kamranjon 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's a good point, we had sort of the precursor to this already and yea likely driven by google themselves. It seems that every time incentives are aligned purely for profit we end up with situations like this where they inevitably run a good thing straight into the ground.

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cush 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Google has already been single-handedly destroying the internet for over a decade by turning into an ad-ridden mess

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PlanksVariable 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Funny, I remember the Internet from over a decade (or two) ago and it was a mess of full-screen ads, seizure-inducing animations, infinite popups, etc. that Google helped eliminate.

	▲	cush 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Google didn’t eliminate malicious ads - adblockers and easylists did that. I hate to break it to you bud, but the full-page ads never went away - they just look like content now. You know why you need to scroll for 9 pages to see the ingredients to a recipe? Google created the pageview driven business model that incentivized the internet to be filled with hostile UX, low-quality lists of paged content, affiliate spam, etc.

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echelon 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We've had 25 years to regulate them or break them up. It's our own fault for under-regulation.

	▲	ThatMedicIsASpy an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It is never too late to make user tracking illegal and destroying the nastiest part of the ad industry
	▲	PlanksVariable 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Perhaps we should look to Europe for inspiration on how to govern tech companies.

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jeswin 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> that the company who helped champion the network effects of the internet and surface truly useful search results...

The amount of data on the web crossed the threshold of organic discoverability some time before the AI boom started. AI makes it go from really bad to really, really bad (99% to 99.99%). As far as I am concerned it doesn't change anything.

The same mechanisms to find good content would work today as well - following humans and networks.

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dleeftink 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If they store both the generated content and the eventual indexed location, they could now filter search results more comprehensively based on content hashes.

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dlillard0 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, helping to produce AI-generated garbage.