News from Google’s AI-soaked developer event this week makes it plain that we’re on the cusp of a new era of search.
Following Microsoft’s molding of OpenAI’s tech into Bing, Google is experimenting with its own AI tech and opening up new ways to use search. It’s clear that we’re about to see the first major overhauls in the market for finding information on the World Wide Web in a really long time.
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As with all major evolutions in technology, these changes to search will have broad and lasting impacts. There will be winners and losers, and among the latter, at least according to early reviews of Google’s new changes to search, will be websites that host writing.
Google and Bing will quickly grow adept at using large language models to generate answers to questions, precluding the need to visit websites to find answers. As a result, media companies, bloggers and scrappy SaaS startups could see fewer visits to their websites and less attention paid to their offerings.
Until the generative AI rush, changes to search engine tech felt incremental, unless it was for monetizing user activity. Google has toiled for years to increase the amount of answers users get on its search pages so they don’t head elsewhere and has sometimes smoothed its advertising load so search results highlight its customers more than websites that don’t advertise.
Has this proven better for the web? I could argue that it hasn’t, but that’s pointless. I’m doubtful Google and its ilk will shake off that commercial bias and build features that will prove good for the end users at its own expense. They cannot afford to do so.
It’s only natural that Google and Bing are not going to prioritize the needs of third-party websites over their own while building their tech.
We should therefore be a little bit worried about the effects of these new AI tools on the veritable ocean of blogs and websites that host little more than text. These webpages are rarely part of a major tech conglomerate and have scarce funds to advertise with. After all, if Google can offer a comprehensive and correct answer to a question, what would you gain from clicking through reams of webpages instead?
If you accept the truism that most people only read headlines, it seems ridiculous to presume that most users will skate past Google’s offerings, hunt for external links and head to the websites. No, I think that Google and Bing are going to be successful in turning their search engines into AI-powered answering services. This is more than a change in terminology; it’s going to change how these services function and how most traffic on the web is directed.
The generative AI tools prevalent today are based on large language models, or LLMs. These LLMs are trained on huge amounts of data (here’s more about how Google and OpenAI build these tools), which is mostly public text from the web for their training. From what we know now, we can presume these datasets will continue to function this way — you don’t want to use an LLM for answers if its underlying knowledge is out of date.
Given how easy generative AI makes it to write like a functional adult, I’m assuming a great number of folks will use such tools to power their writing. If that happens, I’d hazard we’re going to wind up in a world where AI-generated text finds its way into the datasets that generative AI will be trained on. That doesn’t sound too good, but I presume the folks at Google and similar are working on a way to manage that eventuality.
None of this feels reassuring to people who write for a living. As LLMs learn from human writers, they will eventually supplant the very people who trained them.
As I write this column, my mind’s eye is painting a future wherein Google and Bing are more akin to a chatbot than a service that serves up pages of links (or recently, pages of advertisements). If that comes to pass, one major avenue websites have for attracting readers will be narrowed if not blocked up entirely.
That could limit publications’ advertising incomes given their current reliance on search engines for traffic, which in turn could increase how much digital content is locked behind paywalls. We could also see media companies and the like work to protect their content from being ingested by LLMs.
A shattering of the web could ensue. Large LLMs and services that use them could become islands on the web, instead of portals to other locations. Closing those doors is going to shake up marketing, media itself and how anyone tries to find an audience online.
That’s probably going to be a welcome development for services like Substack and beehiiv, which want to bring people in to drive a loop of creation (writing) and distribution (email lists). If search goes the way of the dodo, you’ll want to hold on to your readers ever more tightly.
I assume some of my words have been ingested by LLMs. After all, I have written thousands of articles for TechCrunch, Crunchbase News, other websites and my own blogs over the years, and a lot of that is freely available on the public web. But now that I have a strong incentive to make my work harder to reach, as LLMs are similarly incentivized to keep accreting data from the public web that will be increasingly filled with AI-generated words. I wonder if the web will be cleaved along two lines: human-generated and AI-generated?
TechCrunch will continue to be written by humans, for humans. It may perhaps be a smaller set of people than in the past, given that we are expanding our output behind the TechCrunch+ paywall, but still, the work will involve hands working to bring words to your eyes. While we do so, generative AI could be out there cosplaying as an ouroboros: ingesting its own output and serving it up hot and fresh to users who probably don’t understand how the sausage was made (or recycled). That helps diminish my anxiety.
None of this is to proclaim myself as a Luddite or as against this progress in AI. I’m quite the opposite, actually. Search’s death has been prolonged and agonizing since it became clear that no new effort by Google was going to challenge the revenue and profitability of its search business. The generative AI boom is simply our search giants’ next great gambit to hoard more and share less.
I hope that you’ll still want to read my stuff in the future. If not, at least I probably helped train my replacement.
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