Google Just Killed Google

You may have seen that Google made a major announcement about changes to Search this week. The biggest change since their launch.

Instead of the traditional list of blue links, Google will now generate “interactive experiences” and other custom AI mini-apps on the fly. All based on your search query.

The example they gave is this one: ask a question about black holes, get an interactive model you can play with in return.

It sounds impressive, but it’s also a problem.

I guess it’s time to repeat myself yet again: Large Language Models are not fact engines. They produce plausible-sounding output where accuracy simply depends on how often the right answer shows up in their training data.

When the output is some text, people will usually have enough experience to stay at least a little sceptical (I hope so, anyway). When the output is a beautiful, interactive, model you can explore and click around? I suspect the percentage will go down. There’s a reason teachers like using similar experiences – they stick.

Combine cognitive surrender, which I mentioned yesterday, with an interactive experience, and you’re no longer looking at a search engine. You might even be looking at a belief-manufacturing machine.

Your audience is about to be subjected to a system that generates compelling, attractive, and authoritative-looking explanations of topics you probably understand better than a Large Language Model. They won’t come to your website to check, they’ll have already “learned” what they want from the cool new real-sounding model.

Google also holds 90% of the European search market. Businesses to authorities already depend on Google to reach their clients or citizens. Every move Google makes towards this one-stop experience makes it harder to escape them as the source of truth for your audience.

This new “experience” arrives his summer. Every visit a European user will be making to it, is a visit they won’t be making to your website, or to trusted authorities and information sources.

Then there’s the question that keeps coming up with this whole AI thing: how does any of it make financial sense?

Generating interfaces on the fly uses a lot more compute than displaying a list of links. And if users stick around and no longer visit other sites, ads targeting them will probably be sold at even higher prices. And those prices will come from collecting even more data.

In all of its history, Google made one good thing: a search engine that really empowered people on the web. Then they kept doing bad things until finally destroying that one good thing.

Colin