Of course, you’ve heard of AI and technologies like ChatGPT. More and more of you are even trying to use this technology in your daily life – for fun, at school or maybe even at work.
However, most of the time you need to research AI if you want to use it in your daily life. If you want AI-generated results, you need to use the ChatGPT website or app, or click on a specific tab on something like Microsoft’s Bing.
Now that’s changing, at least for some Google searchers, like me: Monday morning, using regular old Google, I typed in “truman doctrine vietnam war” and got an “AI overview ” – not something Google found on another site, but something it wrote itself.
Screenshot/Google
I haven’t spent much time learning about US foreign policy after WWII recently – which is why I asked Google – but I think this was a pretty good answer, in do ?
But what’s far more interesting than the answer is how Google found it.
I knew Google was playing catch-up in the AI product wars, and I worried about the fate of its core search product in a world where there was no need to generate links to websites containing information – that an AI engine would simply generate. the answers you need. And I knew Google was working on a version of AI-powered search, which you could experiment with for yourself.
But I didn’t know that Google started showing this content for normals, mixed in with all the other search results.
Turns out this has been the case for about a month. And this may or may not be indicative of the fact that Google hasn’t made a big announcement about this – so far the only place I can find on the web that knows about it is this trade journal update Search Engine Land.
Bottom line: For now, Google is testing self-generated “AI previews” for some regular search queries that it thinks might be complex (but answerable) to answer. A Google representative told me that AI responses have been deployed to a “very limited percentage of search traffic” in the US and UK.
And I shouldn’t really be that surprised: ever since OpenAI started wowing people with ChatGPT in the fall in late 2022, it was clear that this technology was coming to searches – that was the whole point of the big partnership from Microsoft with OpenAI which brought the technology to Bing.
But it’s one thing to know it and another to start observing it in nature. And start seeing this as a normal outcome rather than something special.
Google seems to be handling this well and fixing many of the obvious issues that Google-written answers will raise in search.
For example, it clearly labels the results as AI-generated and experimental. And a “learn more” link takes you to this well-written explainer that says things like “Generative AI is not a human being. She can’t think for herself or feel emotions. She is simply excellent at finding models. (And, further down, “Because generative AI is experimental and a work in progress, it can and will make mistakes.”)
And Google also shows its work: if you click on a button in the result, links to useful and relevant sites like the National Archives will be displayed.
Screenshot/Google
Because I’m a responsible journalist, I also asked Google how Google Magi, which powers these results, does or does not interact with the technology that powers Google Gemini, its much-maligned “woke AI” chatbot. I didn’t get a very satisfactory answer, other than Google would like you to consider them as separate products.
I’m happy to let others worry about Google’s dormant state (you hear a lot less yelling about it now, right?), though. I’m more interested in how these types of answers will accelerate the way we already use Google – as a one-stop shop for answers, instead of a place that helps you find another place that has your answers.
This trend has been well documented for years and revolves around Google deciding it would rather you stay on Google – through one of its “knowledge panels” or something similar – rather than going elsewhere to get a response. Even if Google’s business model revolves around selling links to elsewhere.
Right now, Google is trying to keep you on Google by bringing up the text of a site that claims to answer your query. In theory, if you want to know more, you can click on it. But often the Google snippet doesn’t entice you to click. You have what you need. You have finished.
(Meanwhile, I can think of many cases where the information cited by Google in text snippets is fake – at least in part because Google relies on highly ranked web pages whose primary goal is not to be accurate but to be ranked well by Google. Ask Google “What is Jason Kelce’s net worth,” for example, and it will highlight a (not at all helpful) answer from a debit card site that also offers search bait about Taylor’s cat Swift.)
And once you start imagining that Google is providing completely AI-generated answers all the time, with all kinds of queries, things get really interesting.
On the one hand, maybe Google becomes even more valuable because you don’t even pretend it’s a “search engine” anymore, it’s just an autoresponder. And you go there because you are used to going there.
On the other hand: in this scenario, Google will certainly not be the only answering machine. Which means the entire empire and the many businesses that depend on it (like, uh, digital publishers?) are up for grabs.
You can see why Google tests these things carefully and quietly – and also why it needs to find the answer quickly.
businessinsider
