Google CEO is ’empathetic’ towards content creators Search is gone

We are in a period of disruption, according to Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google. While he’s optimistic that Google AI’s previews and search will drive more traffic and engagement, that’s no comfort to the many content creators who have had their websites wiped out by Google in recent years. last months.

In a new interview, Pichai discussed concerns about Google’s damage to websites and businesses, as well as the future of search, content and the web.

“These are disruptive times.” Pichai was asked about publisher concerns following the announcement of AI previews rolling out at Google I/O. He compared this AI shift to concerns about the transition from desktop to mobile and the introduction of snippets:

• “I remain optimistic. …As a company, we recognize the value of this ecosystem, and it is symbiotic. If there isn’t a rich ecosystem creating unique and useful content, what are you setting up and organizing? So we feel it.
• “But I understand the feeling. It’s a big change. These are disruptive times. AI is a big platform change. People plan and invest a lot in creating content. It’s their business. So I understand the perspective (and) I’m not surprised. We engage with many stakeholders, directly and indirectly, but I remain optimistic about how this will actually play out.

Companies condemned. Pichai was asked specifically about two sites that have complained loudly about losing more than 90% of their Google traffic, including HouseFresh and Retro Dodo.

• “It is always difficult to talk about individual cases and, in the end, we try to meet user expectations. Users vote with their feet and people try to determine what is valuable to them. We’re doing this on a large scale, and I can’t answer on a specific site…”
• “I don’t know if this is a uniform trend. I have to look at the data holistically, so anecdotally, there are always times where people have come to a region and said, “I, as a specific site, have done worse.” But it’s like a restaurant saying, “I started having fewer customers this year.” People stopped eating food, or anything. This is not necessarily true. Another restaurant may have opened next door and is doing very well. So it’s hard to say.
• “You may be making a secondary point about smaller sites versus more clustered sites… Ironically, there are times when we’ve made changes to send more traffic to the smaller sites. Some of these sites that complain a lot are the aggregators in the industry. So, should the traffic go to the restaurant that created a website with its menus and other content, or to the people who write about those restaurants? These are deep questions. I’m not saying there is a right answer.

Empathy. In an interesting moment, the tables were turned on Google and Pichai was asked how he felt when OpenAI transcribed over a million hours of YouTube videos to train GPT-4. The fact is that Google does the same thing with millions of websites: it exploits their content, without permission, for profit. Pichai’s responses:

• “Look, whether it’s website owners, content creators, or artists, I can understand how emotional this transformation is. …”
• “The way we’ve taken this approach in many of these cases is to put the creator community at the center as much as possible. We’ve been doing this for a long time with YouTube. Through all of this, we’re trying to figure out what are the right ways to approach this problem.
• “…yes, I understand people’s emotions about this. I’m really very sensitive to how people perceive this moment.
• “Thanks to this AI moment, over time some players will do better because of the content creators who support their platforms, and whoever does best will emerge victorious. I believe it’s a principle of these things over time.

AI content and ranking. Google is in a unique position, where it helps generate AI content (via Gemini) that can be used to flood the web, with the aim of ranking in search. Pichai said he believes “using AI to mass produce content without adding value is not what users are looking for,” adding:

• “Every time you make these disruptive platform changes, you go through a phase like this. I saw this team invest so much. Our entire search quality team has spent the last year improving our ranking systems, etc., to better understand what high-quality content is. If I take the next decade, (the) people who can do this better, who can sift through this, I think, will prevail.

Insights into AI. Pichai continues to promote the idea that AI insights increase search usage. Pichai called it “one of the most positive changes I’ve seen in metrics-based research.”

• “…In many cases, what makes people respond positively to AI insights is that the summary we provide clearly adds value and helps them look at things they might not have thought of otherwise. If you add value at that level, I think people notice it over time, and I think that’s the bar you try to meet. Our data would show that, over 25 years, if you don’t do something that users find useful or enjoyable, they let us know immediately. We see it again and again. »

While this may be true, it seems like it shouldn’t be true, as I explained in Google AI Overviews: More searches, less satisfaction. Pichai also completely avoided two questions about whether Google would make some of this data public, so people can verify whether Google’s claims about AI Overview click-through rates and traffic are true.

A richer Web. Pichai was asked what the web will look like in five years:

• “I hope the Web is much richer in terms of modalities. Today, I feel like the way humans consume information is not yet fully integrated into the web. Today, things exist in very different ways: you have web pages, you have YouTube, etc. But over time, I hope the Web will become much more multimodal, much richer, much more interactive. It’s much more dynamic, which is not the case today.
• “I consider that, while fully recognizing the fact that people can use AI to generate a lot of spam, I also feel that every time there is a new wave of technology, people don’t don’t really know how to use it. When mobile came along, everyone took web pages and integrated them into mobile apps. Then, later, people evolved (by creating) truly native mobile applications.
• “The way people are using AI to solve new things, new use cases, etc. is yet to come. When that happens, I think the web will be much richer as well. So: dynamically compose a UI in a way that makes sense to you. Different people have different needs, but today you don’t compose that UI dynamically. AI can help you get there over time. You can also do it wrong and in the wrong way and people can use it in a superficial way, but there will be entrepreneurs who find an extraordinarily good way to do it, and that way, great new things to come.

The interview. You can watch the interview or read the full transcript on a tech news outlet.