SEOs (like me) are terrified of Google releasing a proper public Search chat — as people would not really need to visit websites.
But the space is incredibly exciting as a user/searcher/average joe.
But the space is incredibly exciting as a user/searcher/average joe.
If your websites add no value to the LLM (hence to the searcher, to the world, how deep should we get?), well then thats a good side effect
If it’s like a featured snippet, should work great. “Here’s an answer, read more here”
If the LLM Hoovers up all the knowledge and doesn’t show where it got it, then there is no incentive to produce the knowledge
I imagine Google is acutely aware of this, they have a symbiotic relationship with site owners. But we’ll see.
There is some sort of issue here not well addressed by copyright
Google has failed to win decisively in the search result ranking arms race. Concrete example: sites that rip from stackoverflow have been ranking higher than stackoverflow in google search results. Other search engines fare worse.
If Google trained a discriminator that penalized these practices I think their search product would dramatically improve and the web as a whole might benefit - although tabloid article farms might sue.
They have 84% market share which seems like winning in all the ways businesses care about, regardless of how it ranks your stackoverflow searches.
The arms race of "fast trash" websites vs quality search results is not being won by Google or anyone else as of today. Google having a business model that doesn't even incentivize them to win that race =/= Google not losing that race. It's closer to them giving up in defeat, which is a loss for all of us (many times over).
Maybe it's more convenient for the user to pay the LLM for the info (paid via ad attention or whatever), but if I'm the one who made the measurements, then shouldn't I be paid too? If the user never "pays" me, then I'm going to stop publishing measurements, and the whole LLM falls apart.
Likewise for generative art. The people who made the training data are a critical part of the ecosystem. Cutting them out seems like cutting out some critical part of a food chain.
Google Search could pay some small percentage back when they use their work. But it would be a weird one so not sure that's really going to happen.