Google is the guardian of the Internet. You ask it a question and it directs you to a website that can answer that question for you.
Except that’s not really the case anymore. Google frequently tries to answer your question itself, on Google-owned real estate, so you don’t need to go anywhere else. And now the company is stepping up its efforts with AI-generated answers that will be the standard answer for all searches in the near future.
One of the problems with this plan is that generative AI engines just invent things. The other, more existential problem for Google and the Internet: if Google answers all your queries on its own site, why would you go anywhere else?
People who make a living putting things on the Internet have been panicking about this future for some time. But there is also a risk for Google: if people don’t post information on the Internet, what will Google use to create answers?
Charlie Warzel of The Atlantic wonders about all of this and has no answers (Charlie knows how to make you click on a story, though – call your story “The Toilet Theory of the Internet”). I don’t think Google knows it either, which is partly due to why the company’s answers to the questions people have about all this – including those from CEO Sundar Pichai – are both wave And difficult to take literally.
One question I haven’t seen addressed in most of these articles: Isn’t Google to have keep sending people to websites? Because selling sponsored website links is the economic engine that powers this $2 trillion business. So this is all going to be complicated – for Google, for web publishers, and for all of us.
businessinsider
