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This month, Google dropped a few hints about how its most important and lucrative product, Search, will be changing in the coming months. Earlier this year, the company rolled out AI Overviews — generated summary blurbs that are frequently passable and not infrequently completely erroneous — to many of its customers. “This week, we’re rolling out search results pages organized with AI in the U.S.,” the company said in a blog post. The test would be limited to “recipes and meal inspiration” for now, but searchers will “now see a full-page experience, with relevant results organized just for [them].” This, Google suggested, would be an exciting improvement. “You can easily explore content and perspectives from across the web including articles, videos, forums, and more — all in one place,” the company said. Not only that, but the company is testing a new design for AI Overviews that “adds prominent links to supporting webpages directly within the text.” Oh, and one more thing about the AI Overviews: Google has been “carefully testing ads” for “relevant queries.”
It doesn’t take much extrapolation to imagine AI Overviews, which are currently contained in a box above the standard and ever more cluttered search page, expanding from summaries to more comprehensive digests of information, with more citations, more things to tap and click, and space for sponsorship. Google’s most visible, high-stakes AI deployment is a set of tools that will automatically find and “organize” content from the web, present it in summary with prominent links, and have big chunky ads for products, not just links. Sound familiar? Google’s vision for the future of AI is … Google, again.
The prevailing narrative around Google’s current situation is that, despite its leadership in AI research, it was caught flat-footed by the arrival of apps like ChatGPT. It’s been hampered in its attempts to respond by institutional caution and clumsy moderation choices, but also by fear that revamping Search, a great product gradually undermined by an even greater business model, might threaten its underlying ad business. There simply isn’t as much room for ads, and not as much tapping or clicking, in a world where search engines start answering questions. There’s a lot of truth in this story, but it depends on an understanding of what Google has become and how people use it that’s slightly out of date.
Google is, substantially, still a platform for finding content on the web supported by ads from brands and websites. It’s also, by default, a major e-commerce platform, or at least a site through which we start to find things to buy. This has changed how the service looks and feels as well as the entire web around it. It should also change how we think about Google’s competition. Sure, it should be worried about OpenAI. But it might be more worried about … Amazon?
I don’t mean to understate the extent to which the arrival of ChatGPT and other AI services has rattled Google: It has. When Google and Microsoft showed off their first AI search demos in early 2023, they highlighted the ability to “chat” with your search engine, which would then produce, in conversational format or a clean, simple digest, links and summaries from the web. These were compelling previews of an entirely new interface. Arguably the most enticing things about them were that they were stripped down and simple, and they did what they were asked.
That’s not quite what they ended up shipping, of course. AI Overviews, in the beginning, leaned hard into summary, attempting to synthesize full answers while minimizing outside content. They also appeared as one more widget among many, another extra box with an unclear relationship to the rest of the results page, sometimes existing in conflict with other information presented just a few inches away. Google’s previews of its “AI-organized” results pages now look an awful lot like Google Search result pages, with a bunch of grids and modules and lists remixed but ultimately sort of piled together. Google, despite suggestions that it might change everything, is rapidly circling back around to where it started:
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Illustration: Intelligencer
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