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Comment by kamranjon | Hacker News Reader

Does it seem, I'm not sure, ironic maybe? That the main example here is "An app that writes blog posts" - "Researches a topic and writes a blog post about it" - that the company who helped champion the network effects of the internet and surface truly useful search results is now helping to destroy that very same thing they built their entire business on?

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Different teams. This AI team at Google cares not for the health of the web. They barely remember that Google has a search engine, except of course for the groudbreaking AI search results which are responsible for many large numbers for use in annual reviews. This team's goal is to sell their AI solution, and if that means demonstrating its ability to generate tools that create crap content that harms the search engine results, well, I'm sure another AI solution can probably combat that later.

> This AI team at Google cares not for the health of the web. They barely remember that Google has a search engine

Neithet do any teams at Google, including the search teams. Google is an ad company with 80% of its revenue coming from ads. They couldn't give two shits about the health of the web.

The man who killed Google search was a minor hit when it was published: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

That contradicts the long-standing claim that Google does care about as many people using as good a WWW as possible. A ghost town has plenty of ad space, but not much ad revenue.

Don't look at what a company claims. Look at what the company does.

By that logic no company cares about anything but profits.

How is this surprising? The absolute vast majority of companies care about nothing but profits.

As for Google, what I wrote was literally spelled out in their own emails uncovered in court proceedings.

You say that like it’s this big contradiction of some obvious truth, so go on, tell us about this company you know of that Really Cares.

The goal of every startup is to be acquired.

Google Search has like 10 years of history of doing its best not to get you to click on a search result, but to answer your question directly or at the very least keep you on their platform while screwing over website owners.

The first two iteration of this were AMP and Instant Answers, the third one is AI Overview. AI Overview should not be seen in isolation, but as a part of the pattern. If it weren't for it, Google would double down on some other method of reaching the same goal.

This one will end up the same way the other two did: there's gonna be a vocal minority that's gonna consider it unfair and a web killer, the vast majority of users won't have an opinion, Google will not care, "the web" will play along, those early adopters are temporarily gonna have an advantage in this "new age" and some will die in the process, but the vast majority is gonna continue on as if nothing happened.

It's also not gonna be the final iteration of this process because shiny new things sound better to investors than marginal improvements, so X years from now AI Overview is gonna be seen as something "old-fashioned", Google Search will pivot once again, and the rest of the web will follow to keep Google happy.

you know, there is a third group - a large number of users which find the AI overview useful

Very large even. Especially considering the explosion of ai-crap in the search results

Yeah hate to say it, because I am an AI hater, but I love the AI results in Google and Kagi. I barely click results anymore for basic questions unless it's something important enough for me to need verification to ensure the AI-gen answer wasn't a hallucination. It's been so nice not having to pick through the cesspool that is StackOverflow to find answers to quick cli questions, or wade through SEO-generated, Amazon-affiliate link garbage for more general questions.

This is what the vast majority of users will do of course. The issue people have with it is that it breaks the "social contract" of the web, which is that part of the advertising income goes to the site that provided the information the answer is based on. That, by destroying that income, "overviews" (now including AI overviews, but that's not where it started) are destroying first publishers and I'm sure it'll go all the way through until Youtube is entirely destroyed as well.

Of course, it does not destroy Google's income ... and it destroys the promise Google made long ago, which is to never keep users on Google platforms.

Oh and to add insult to injury, want to bet Opal will force app developers into what you probably never even imaged would happen on the web? Pay-per-view. Not for a video. For a website/app.

> the vast majority of users won't have an opinion

They're here, they don't care how they get from point A to point B, the tech used to achieve that result is completely irrelevant to them. AI? Great. Not AI such as the Instant Answers era? Also great. Average Joe does not spend his time thinking about the economics of the web.

But you shouldn't confuse them finding "AI" useful now with them being attached to it long term. It's a hip new tool now, but the novelty will fade and Google will have to re-invent themselves all over again. If anything, they kinda screwed themselves over by calling this "AI". AI is supposed to be something within reach, but always some years away. By wasting that term for the current era, it's gonna suck so hard to think of a new marketing term that's gonna be seen as an improvement in comparison to the term "AI".

Which is saddening as the first thing I think when I see this overview is "How do I verify this statement is correct" and paradoxically it sometimes just slows me down.

HN's hate for LLM based AI blinds it to this uncomfortable possibility

Arguably the ad business is to blame. It created a perverse incentive. They maximized pay-to-play. The losers were authors that previously published on a passion budget (and would/could never pay for ads). AI is just the last nail in the coffin.

I dont think so. They also triggered SEO race where businesses pump out same bland blogposts to optimize ranking. Content made by humans for those companies was the only viable way at that time, and now new synthetic method emerges - whatever generates revenue will win. AI reels and tiktoks get views, so why bother with human generated content after the training on models have been done? Sad but true.

That's a good point, we had sort of the precursor to this already and yea likely driven by google themselves. It seems that every time incentives are aligned purely for profit we end up with situations like this where they inevitably run a good thing straight into the ground.

Google has already been single-handedly destroying the internet for over a decade by turning into an ad-ridden mess

We've had 25 years to regulate them or break them up. It's our own fault for under-regulation.

Perhaps we should look to Europe for inspiration on how to govern tech companies.

It is never too late to make user tracking illegal and destroying the nastiest part of the ad industry

We could break their back if we required them to respect trademarks.

Google captured the browser with 92+% "browser -> search" funnel market share.

They turned the URL bar into "search", meaning that the method of finding trademarked companies and products now flows through a competitive bidding marketplace where competitors can slide in front of your hard-earned brand.

This ought to be illegal.

You’re using “we” very liberally

Funny, I remember the Internet from over a decade (or two) ago and it was a mess of full-screen ads, seizure-inducing animations, infinite popups, etc. that Google helped eliminate.

Google didn’t eliminate malicious ads - adblockers and easylists did that.

I hate to break it to you bud, but the full-page ads never went away - they just look like content now. You know why you need to scroll for 9 pages to see the ingredients to a recipe?

Google created the pageview driven business model that incentivized the internet to be filled with hostile UX, low-quality lists of paged content, affiliate spam, etc.

> that the company who helped champion the network effects of the internet and surface truly useful search results...

The amount of data on the web crossed the threshold of organic discoverability some time before the AI boom started. AI makes it go from really bad to really, really bad (99% to 99.99%). As far as I am concerned it doesn't change anything.

The same mechanisms to find good content would work today as well - following humans and networks.

If they store both the generated content and the eventual indexed location, they could now filter search results more comprehensively based on content hashes.

Yeah, helping to produce AI-generated garbage.

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