by Jacob Ridley, Senior Hardware Editor
This week I was: visit my home country, Wales in the metaverse. Oh, with all this AI stuff you forgot about the metaverse, huh?
How did we get into this mess? A handful of companies claim to oversee a service that billions of people around the globe contribute to. We rely so heavily on Google to point us in the right direction that the company is now able to gain a sense of ownership over the content it is supposed to be signaling. A handful of executives at Google shouldn’t have the power to change the internet, but they do. They are. And there seems little we can do to stop them.
Google revealed a lot of new features coming to Google Search at Google I/O this week, the most notable of which was AI Overviews. These are designed to answer user questions faster: You type or speak a question in Google search, Google finds an answer and generates an answer. Right there on the page.
“Google will do the Googling for you,” says Liz Reid, head of Google Search.
Google’s AI model, Gemini, is the key. It is using the most complex and extensive library of information in the world to provide these answers to its users: Us.
Google acts as a gateway to the internet not only because it gives us directions on where to go to retrieve information, but it also serves a high number of ads. The money goes into the publishers’ pockets, which, in turn, ends up paying for more content. A rosy view of the multifaceted business of publishing, I’ll admit, but that’s how this generally works. Sprinkle in some cash flow from affiliate marketing and you have the earnings report for plenty of non-commercial websites.
So what happens when the publisher gets fewer page views on their content? The stakes grow higher, the money to invest decreases, the ads grow worse, and the content becomes more desperate to attract visitors. The ‘enshitification’ of the internet is, in the end, a monetary issue.
And Google gets a say in it. It sits at the center of the internet, whether you use its services often or not. That’s been a problem in a number of ways over the years, as the company looks to find new ways to serve up information and make money through its internet index, Search.
The first announcements. Then, the information served is ripped straight out of websites directly on the search page. It is this behavior that has seen Google in trouble with many countries and even the EU. The European Bloc legislation, adopted by the member states, hoped to limit the nabbing of content by Google without a fair return to the publishers for their work. Google responded by removing or threatening to remove its services from some countries entirely. Google News was not put back online in Spain until 2022.
With the advent of Google’s AI-powered search, we may be about to find out what happens when Google reduces a publisher’s ability to find suitable revenue. And the results are unlikely to be many.
Google says of the change: “As we expand this experience, we will continue to focus on sending valuable traffic to publishers and creators.” That one sentence, in a sea of AI news, with no further clarification of how it intends to do that beyond a handful of links to further reading in the result. Reid suggested before I/O that he expects to see growth in traffic spurred by users wanting to dig deeper into AI-answered topics, though it remains to be seen whether that will happen. that.
Google indicates that it will start rolling out AI Overviews only when it sees the greatest benefit from using it. Although there is nothing to expressly prevent the gradual expansion into more of the traditional search engine.
Departing from Google’s previous form and refusing to pay publishers back, it’s easy to see why many are concerned. The New York Times published an article titled “Can Google Give AI Answers Without Breaking the Web?” The NYT is currently suing OpenAI over the use of its articles to train conversations.
Similarly, Google’s CEO was asked if the company is interested in OpenAI using YouTube videos to train its competing models. I would be surprised if Google wanted to fight that battle, considering its own position in AI.
The issue ultimately stems from a larger one regarding AI: who easily scrapes data for use in training and operating artificial intelligence systems? Copyright owners for videos, images and text have sounded the alarm about the mass collection of data to train AI systems. Although we are now talking about the collection, processing and reuse of information in real time. In UK law, there is no protection of copyright infringement for lifting stories—taking facts published by others—provided they are not copied identically outside of quotations. That means there’s no clear cure for Google’s latest features.
A publisher may use tags to disable many of Google’s rich results features. This would also be similar disqualify the content from being used by AI Overviews. However, AI Overviews takes up a portion of the search results page and therefore pushes down any naturally occurring content, which has already gradually fallen to smaller spots over the years. Google could change the size to make it more manageable, though, and may have already done so during earlier development. This feature is not entirely new.
Although Google should be challenged for what it is doing. Not least because it seems to go against Google’s own recommendations on how to make good content. As the company with the keys to the internet, publishers have been stuck for a long time listening to Google’s advice on how to appear on its platform. He advises creators to follow four guiding principles: EEAT.
E for experience, E for expertise, A for authority, T for trust.
How far can these be achieved with less readers, less comments, less money and AI going ahead and copying everyone’s answers for Google’s own benefit? It might work, for a while, then the money runs out and things will definitely get worse. At what point will the reduction in original content and Google’s Search AI throwing out wrong answers lead to a terrible user experience? People argue that he is already poor enough doing that today.
Not to mention the risk of misinformation from a third party (Google) coming in and updating the wording to erode any credibility the individual publisher has earned.
Why should Google benefit from the hard work of others for a system that is increasingly against the actual content creators? I would love to know.
Everyone connected to the internet deserves a sea change of their own. A move away from mega-corporations claiming to run things and back to communities of people willing to share their ideas and space with others. Google didn’t create the internet, and Google didn’t make it. More than ever, it feels like Google is leading the way.
