MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) — Google on Tuesday unveiled an improved search engine that frequently prioritizes responses created by artificial intelligence over website links. This change promises to speed up the search for information while potentially disrupting the flow of money-making. internet traffic.
The revamp, announced at Google's annual developer conference, begins this week in the US, where hundreds of millions of people regularly see summaries of conversations generated by the company's AI technology at the top of search engine results pages. I will do it.
AI summaries will only appear when Google's technology determines it's the quickest and most effective way to satisfy your curiosity. This solution is more likely to occur with complex themes or when people are brainstorming or planning. Simple searches like store recommendations or weather forecasts will likely continue to show links and ads to Google's traditional website.
Google begins testing AI Overview A small group of users selected 1 year ago, but the company is currently making this feature a staple of search results in the US before rolling it out to other parts of the world. By the end of the year, Google expects AI overviews to appear repeatedly in search results for about 1 billion people.
In addition to bringing more AI to its dominant search engine, Google used the packed conference, held at an outdoor theater near its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., to explore new technologies that will reshape business and society. Introducing progress.
The next step in AI included more advanced analytics powered by Gemini. Announced technology and smarter assistants, or “agents”, including a nascent version called “Astra” that can understand, describe, and remember what is shown through a smartphone's camera lens. Google highlighted its AI efforts by having Demis Hassabis, the executive who oversees AI technology, speak for the first time at the company's flagship conference.
The introduction of AI to Google's search engine marks one of the most dramatic changes the company has made to its foundation since its founding in the late 1990s. This is a move that opens the door to further growth and innovation, but it also threatens to cause major changes in web surfing habits.
“This bold and responsible approach is fundamental to fulfilling our mission and making AI more useful for everyone,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai told reporters. ” he said.
Pichai, who is well aware of how much attention the technology has received, ended his nearly two-hour presentation by asking how many times AI was mentioned in Google's Gemini model. Count: 120, and when Pichai says “AI” again, the count increases by one more.
The increased focus on AI will introduce new risks to the internet ecosystem, which relies heavily on digital advertising, the lifeblood of the economy.
Google would be in trouble if AI Overview reduces advertising associated with its search engine, which generated $175 billion in revenue last year alone. And website publishers, from mainstream media to entrepreneurs and startups with a narrower theme focus, find that AI overviews are too informative, resulting in fewer clicks on links on their websites, and even more. If it shows up at the bottom of the results page, you're going to suffer.
Mark McCallum, chief innovation officer at Raptive, which powers around 5,000 websites, says that based on habits revealed during the past year of testing Google's AI Overview, de-emphasize website links. He said that about 25% of traffic could be negatively affected. Publishers make money from content.
A drop in traffic of this magnitude could lead to billions of dollars in lost advertising revenue, a devastating blow to AI technology that pulls information from many websites that could potentially lose revenue. It will be.
“Google's relationship with publishers has been pretty symbiotic, but when they got into AI, essentially what happened was that the big tech companies used this creative content to train their AI models. That's true,” McCallum said. “We are now seeing it being used for its own commercial purposes, in effect a transfer of wealth from small independent companies to Big Tech.”
But Google found that the AI brief resulted in people searching more while testing the technology. “All of a sudden you can ask questions that were previously too difficult,” Liz Reed, who oversees the company's search operations, told The Associated Press in an interview. . He declined to provide specific numbers on the volume of link clicks during AI Overview testing.
“The reality is that even when people know what AI is, they still want to click and go to the web,” Reid says. “They want to start with an overview of AI and then dig deeper. We will continue to innovate on what AI is and how to send the most useful traffic to the web.”
Over the past 18 months, the increased use of AI technology to summarize information in chatbots such as Google's Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT has led to an increase in the number of companies providing services that are writing books to improve their services. Legal questions have already arisen about whether they are illegally extracting from copyright-protected material. This is the central claim in the high-profile lawsuit. The New York Times filed late last year. To OpenAI and its biggest supporter Microsoft.
Google's AI brief could also lead to lawsuits, especially if the company siphons traffic or ad sales from websites that appear to be unfairly profiting from their content. But as the technology advanced and was used by competing services like ChatGPT and emerging search engines, the company had to take risks. Confused, Jim Yu, executive chairman of BrightEdge, which helps websites rank higher in Google's search results.
“This is definitely the next chapter in search,” Yu says. “He seems to be adjusting three key variables simultaneously: the quality of search, the flow of traffic within the ecosystem, and the monetization of that traffic. There hasn't been a bigger moment in search than this in a long time. ”
Outside the amphitheater, dozens of protesters chained themselves together and blocked one of the entrances to the conference. The protesters targeted a $1.2 billion deal known as “Project Nimbus” that would provide artificial intelligence technology to the Israeli government. They claim the system is being deployed lethally in the Gaza war, but Google refutes this claim. The demonstrations do not appear to have affected attendance at the conference or the enthusiasm of the crowd inside.