Google used to take pride in minimizing time we spent...

Google used to take pride in minimizing time we spent there, guiding us to relevant pages as quickly as possible. Over time, they tried to answer everything themselves: longer snippets, inline FAQs, search results full of knowledge panels.

Today's Bard announcement feels like their natural evolution: extracting all value out of the internet for themselves, burying pages at the bottom of each GPT-generated essay like footnotes. https://blog.google/technology/ai/bard-google-ai-search-updates/

Like 7 Feb 2023 at 2:14 | Open on xoxo.zone

2 comments

Andy Baio

Of course, they frame it as "making it easier for people to get to the heart of what they’re looking for and get things done." But how long will publishers, blogs, online communities, and other creators tolerate generating free content to feed their machine, while getting little to nothing in return?

It's only a one line change:
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">

7 Feb 2023 at 2:23 | Open on xoxo.zone

Andy Baio

Personally, I wish that the "code red" response that ChatGPT inspired at Google wasn't to launch a dozen AI products that their red teams and AI ethicists have warned them not to release, but to combat the tsunami of AI-generated SEO spam bullshit that's in the process of destroying their core product. Instead, they're blissfully launching new free tools to generate even more of it.

7 Feb 2023 at 2:29 | Open on xoxo.zone