Google’s notoriously wonky AI Overviews feature — you know, the one that repeatedly makes up facts and literally tells users to eat rocks — is about to get a whole lot more annoying.
On Thursday, the tech giant announced that its AI-generated search summaries will now begin to show ads above, below, and within them, as a way of demonstrating that the technology is capable of actually making money.
It will also serve to assuage concerns that AI chatbots could eat into search ad revenues, which are Google’s biggest cash cow.
Now, if you search how to get a grass stain out of jeans, as seen in an example in Google’s blog post, you’ll get an AI summary which contains a carousel of relevant website links, plus a heavy helping of “Sponsored” ads for stain removers. Revolutionary stuff.
You guys can hate on this but I, for one, have always dreamed of unreliable search results with links to relevant businesses embedded within the text. If only a voice assistant could read them out loud and also remind me to drink Pepsi every other paragraph, we’ll finally have achieved the promise of the Internet.
AI as far as big tech is concerned is simply a way to “fix” search engines so that they don’t do the awful crime of fundamentally segregating ads from search results.
it is literally the whole damn point of shoving AI down everybodies throat…
it is literally the whole damn point of shoving AI down everybodies throat…
To be fair, it didn’t start out that way. A lot of tech companies just didn’t want to be seen as being behind while OpenAI was making shockwaves around the globe. Iirc, after ChatGPT hit the mainstream a couple years ago, Google’s CEO was said to have sent a company-wide email demanding their own AI research become their number 1 priority.
Now that they finally have their own competitive model, they have to justify why they spent hundreds of millions of dollars over numerous years on this tech. Unfortunately for the rest of us, this just means enshittification will reach new levels… sigh…
“This other company is lying about how good their product is and everyone is buying their bullshit. We can’t miss the bandwagon!”
Ads have become so deeply embedded into search results that even Google now can no longer tell the difference between them!?!?
Cool, now it’s terrible and annoying. Use another search engine.
Honestly, switching over to SearXNG was the best choice I ever made. Not only do I not have to see this AI bullshit, but it’s so refreshing to not have to append “reddit” to the end of nearly every search I do to find anything even remotely useful. Being able to self-host it is also really nice now that I’ve gotten it and nginx set up.
It ain’t perfect, but the last time I felt like I discovered such a big improvement to using the Internet was when I found out about ad-blockers.
In case anyone reading this is curious, Kagi is not capable of storing the impossibly vast and expensive data storage and speeds required to query large indexes of the internet, and so leverages Google and Bing indexes in its search, which is exactly what SearXNG and DuckDuckGo both do for free.
What you pay for is honestly a fancy UI and the ability to quality control the search results for them, again already done for free by other search engines.
Wait, for real? I really thought kagi had its own thing going on, and that was why people would pay for it. Not like a fully bespoke index, but I assumed it was more than that. I guess the “quality control” is what I had heard about.
There’s no way on Satan’s green earth that a small startup company started in 2018 has a search engine index as large and fast as the one started 30 years ago and has been indexing the entire internet since then (Google). Even Microsoft can’t compete without dumping billions of dollars into Bing by forcing people to use it as default on their operating systems, renting/purchasing the now ancient Yahoo indexing databases, leeching software engineer talent from competitors with promises of huge paychecks, and greasing hands in China.
