This is exactly it. Google is trying to get people to stay on the pages they click, and they optimize for this behavior, not for utility or for quickly accessing information.

If you go to a page and immediately find what you are looking for, Google interprets that as failure.

This is why Bing and AI based search can completely beat Google web search, because they are trying to serve the searcher rather than serve ads.

The problem AI search has is monetization, openAI can't run gpu server farms to serve 100M customers for free forever. This was a problem that plagued early google as well, sergey and larry were against using ads for monetization, but in the end that i what drove the business to profitability

I wonder if AI search could be sth consumers would happily pay a tiny bit for

They wouldn't pay for AI search, but might for AI that also searches.

I don't get where this "Everything must be free+ads' mentality comes from. Netflix thrived for a decade using subscriptions, Microsoft and Apple's businesses are primarily subscription based.

AIs are so extremely useful to some users, that they'll gladly pay $$ per month to use it. And the size of 'some' increases radically with each leap in AI's capabilities.

GPTs don't have to be gimped to just search. Even GPT-4 today with wolfram alpha can obliterate most low-level tutors. It will be a personal tutor, therapist, coding assistant, secretary, storyteller, entertainer all in one very soon. People will pay for it.

sth?

"Something", perhaps.

Yes :-)

…for now.

AI search seems to have similar dynamics to traditional search. The people writing the stuff you’re searching for need to make money. (For example, AI doesn’t magically know about real-world events. It needs a human being to write about it.) Then the company offering the search product needs to make money too.

If you compensate sites for using their data in your AI product, then there will be the same incentives as now to game the system (AISEO?)

If you don’t compensate sites, then they’re not incentivized to produce the content that makes your search product useful.

I still find it hard to believe. I've been at Google until 2015, which was a long time ago, but at that time the separation between Search and Ads was considered near sacred. Ads representatives couldn't even ask "Hey, my customer asked why their site is below this other irrelevant site for this query, this seems like a bug in search ranking..."

Pretty much everybody understood that we will lose in the long term, if we let ad revenue even be a consideration in search ranking. (...which makes today's bad search experiences even more puzzling.)

I'm in neither Search nor Ads, but have been at Google long enough to have seen the massive change in internal culture between 2015 and the present day. I don't want to speculate on any specifics, but it's pretty clear to me that we shouldn't be applying 2015-era logic or perceptions to today's Google and expecting them to hold.

I joined in 2014 and left in 2019, and it was much different company by the end. My wife still works there, and she tells me it is different still from since when I left.

Developer focused blogs rarely show google ads. Upsells to saas like fly.io are more common

I just don't think this is true. I just think Google has become actually bad at search, and there is no malice.

The problem with SEO spam was always there (remember expert sex change?) but they beat it before... but now it became bad again.

But they have monopoly anyway (bing is even worse for actually searching, ddg is just bing, brave search sucks) so they don't really care. What are you gonna do, use Ask.com?

pay for kagi.com, although that's not an option for >99% of internet users.