Inside Google’s scramble to reinvent its $160 billion search business—and survive the A.I. revolution

The challenge at Alphabet: competing in the A.I. chatbot race without blowing up a $160 billion search-and-ads empire.

BYJEREMY KAHN

July 25, 2023 at 4:30 PM GMT+7

Photo Illustration of Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai looking up towards search boxes filled with text about the future of AI.Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai declared Google to be an “A.I.-first” company way back in 2016. Now A.I. is having a major moment—but a Google rival is grabbing all the attention.

ILLUSTRATION BY JUSTIN METZ; PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, parent company of Google, stands onstage in front of a packed house at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, Calif. He’s doing his best interpretation of a role pioneered by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates: the tech CEO as part pop idol, part tent-revival preacher, deliverer of divine revelation, not in song or sermon but in software and silicon. Except the soft-spoken, introverted Pichai is not a natural for the role: Somehow his vibe is more high school musical than Hollywood Bowl.

Pichai declared Google to be an “A.I.-first” company way back in 2016. Now A.I. is having a major moment—but a Google rival is grabbing all the attention. The November debut of ChatGPT caught Google off guard, setting off a frantic six months in which it scrambled to match the generative A.I. offerings being rolled out by ChatGPT creator OpenAI and its partner and backer, Microsoft.

Here, at the company’s huge annual I/O developer conference in May, Pichai wants to show off what Google built in those six months. He reveals a new Gmail feature called Help Me Write, which automatically drafts whole emails based on a text prompt; an A.I.-powered immersive view in Google Maps that builds a realistic 3D preview of a user’s route; generative A.I. photo editing tools; and much more. He talks about the powerful PaLM 2 large language model (LLM) that underpins much of this technology—including Bard, Google’s ChatGPT competitor. And he mentions a powerful family of A.I. models under development, called Gemini, that could immensely expand A.I.’s impact—and its risks.

But Pichai dances around the topic that so many in the audience, and watching from around the world on a livestream, most want to hear about: What’s the plan for Search? Search, after all, is Google’s first and foremost product, driving more than $160 billion in revenue last year—about 60% of Alphabet’s total. Now that A.I. chatbots can deliver information from across the internet, not as a list of links but in conversational prose, what happens to this profit machine?

The CEO barely flicks at the issue at the top of his keynote. “With a bold and responsible approach, we are reimagining all our core products, including Search,” Pichai says. It’s an oddly muted way to introduce the product on which the fate of his company—and his legacy—may depend. You can sense the audience’s impatience to hear more in every round of tepid, polite applause Pichai receives for the rest of his address.

Sundar Pichai photographed at Google in Mountain View, CA on January 9, 2020.PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK

But Pichai never returns to the topic. Instead, he leaves it to Cathy Edwards, Google’s vice president of Search, to explain what the company calls, awkwardly, “search generative experience,” or SGE. A combination of search and generative A.I., it returns a single, summarized “snapshot” answer to a user’s search, along with links to websites that corroborate it. Users can ask follow-up questions, much as they would with a chatbot.

It’s a potentially impressive answer generator. But will it generate revenue? That question is at the heart of Google’s innovator’s dilemma.

Alphabet says SGE is “an experiment.” But Pichai has made clear that SGE or something a lot like it will play a key role in Search’s future. “These are going to be part of the mainstream search experience,” the CEO told Bloomberg in June. The technology is certainly not there yet. SGE is relatively slow, and like all generative A.I., it’s prone to a phenomenon computer scientists call “hallucination,” confidently delivering invented information. That can be dangerous in a search engine, as Pichai readily acknowledges. If a parent googles Tylenol dosage for their child, as he told Bloomberg, “there’s no room to get that wrong.”

SGE’s arrival is an indication of just how quickly Google has bounced back in the A.I. arms race. The tech draws on Google’s decades of experience in A.I. and search, demonstrating how much firepower Alphabet can bring to bear. But it also exposes Alphabet’s vulnerability in this moment of profound change. Chatbot-style information gathering threatens to cannibalize Google’s traditional Search and its incredibly lucrative advertising-driven business model. Ominously, many people prefer ChatGPT’s answers to Google’s familiar list of links. “Search as we know it will disappear,” predicts Jay Pattisall, an analyst at research firm Forrester.

So it’s not just Tylenol doses that Pichai and Alphabet can’t afford to botch. Google has the tools to be great at A.I.; what it doesn’t have, yet, is a strategy that comes anywhere near matching the ad revenue that turned Alphabet into the world’s 17th-biggest company. How Google plays this transition will determine whether it will survive, as both a verb and a company, well into the next decade.

Newsletter-Gold-LineWhen ChatGPT arrived, some commentators compared its significance to the debut of the iPhone or the personal computer; others took bigger swings and placed the chatbot alongside electric motors or the printing press. But to many executives, money managers, and technologists, one thing was obvious from the start: ChatGPT is a dagger pointed straight at Alphabet’s heart. Within hours of ChatGPT’s debut, users playing with the new chatbot declared it “a Google killer.”

Although ChatGPT itself did not have access to the internet, many observers correctly speculated that it would be relatively easy to give A.I.-powered chatbots access to a search engine to help inform their responses. For many queries, ChatGPT’s unified response seemed better than having to wade through multiple links to cobble together information. Plus, the chatbot could write code, compose haikus, craft high school history papers, create marketing plans, and offer life coaching. A Google search can’t do that.

Microsoft—which has invested $13 billion into OpenAI so far—almost immediately moved to integrate OpenAI’s technology into its also-ran search engine, Bing, which had never achieved more than 3% market share. The integration, commentators thought, might give Bing its best shot at knocking Google Search from its pedestal. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, quipped that Google was “the 800-pound gorilla” of search, adding, “I want people to know that we made them dance.”

Nadella actually had more faith in his competitor’s dancing skills than some commentators, who seemed to think Google was too bureaucratic and sluggish to boogie. Google’s world-class A.I. team had long been the envy of the tech community. Indeed, in 2017, Google researchers had invented the basic algorithmic design underpinning the entire generative A.I. boom, a kind of artificial neural network called a transformer. (The T in ChatGPT stands for “transformer.”) But Alphabet didn’t seem to know how to turn that research into products that fired the public imagination. Google had actually created a powerful chatbot called LaMDA in 2021. LaMDA’s dialogue skills were superlative. But its responses, like those from any LLM, can be inaccurate, exhibit bias, or just be bizarre and disturbing. Until those issues were resolved—and the A.I. community is far from resolving them—Google feared that releasing it would be irresponsible and pose a reputational risk.

Perhaps as important, there was no obvious way that a chatbot fit with Google’s primary business model—advertising. Compared with Google Search, a summarized answer or a dialogue thread seemed to provide far less opportunity for advertising placement or sponsored links.

To many, that conflict exposed deeper cultural impediments. Google, according to some former employees, has grown too comfortable with its market dominance, too complacent and bureaucratic, to respond to as fast-moving a shift as generative A.I. Entrepreneur Praveen Seshadri joined Google after the company acquired his startup AppSheet in 2020. Shortly after leaving earlier this year, he wrote a blog post in which he said that the company had four core problems: no mission, no urgency, delusions of exceptionalism, and mismanagement. All of these, he said, were “the natural consequences of having a money-printing machine called ‘Ads’ that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins.”

Four other former employees who have left Google in the past two years characterized the culture similarly. (They spoke to Fortune on the condition their names not be used, for fear of violating separation agreements or damaging their career prospects.) “The amount of red tape you would have to wade through just to improve an existing feature, let alone a new product, was mind-boggling,” one said. Another said Google often used the massive scale of its user base and revenues as an excuse not to embrace new ideas. “They set the bar so high in terms of impact that almost nothing could ever clear it,” another said.

Such insider discontent only fueled the broader narrative: Google was toast. In the five weeks between ChatGPT’s release and New Year’s Day, Alphabet’s stock dropped 12%.

By mid-December, there were signs of panic inside the Googleplex. The New York Times reported that Alphabet had declared “a code red” to catch OpenAI and Microsoft. Google’s cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who stepped away from day-to-day responsibilities in 2019—but exercise majority control over the company’s shares through a super-voting class of stock—were suddenly back, with Brin reportedly rolling up his sleeves and helping to write code.

It was hard to interpret the cofounders’ return as a ringing endorsement of Pichai’s leadership. But Google executives frame Page and Brin’s renewed presence—and indeed the whole recent scramble—as driven by enthusiasm rather than alarm. “You have to remember, both Larry and Sergey are computer scientists,” says Kent Walker, Alphabet’s president of global affairs, who oversees the company’s content policies and its responsible innovation team, among other duties. “Larry and Sergey are excited about the possibility.” For his part, Pichai later told a Times podcast that he never instituted a “code red.” He did, however, say he was “asking teams to move with urgency” to figure out how to translate generative A.I. into “deep, meaningful experiences.”

Those urgings clearly had an effect. In February, Google announced Bard, its ChatGPT competitor. By March, it had previewed the writing assistant functions for Workspace, as well as its Vertex A.I. environment, which helps its cloud customers train and run generative A.I. applications on their own data. At I/O in May, it seemed almost every Google product was getting a shiny new generative-A.I. gloss. Some investors were impressed. The company’s “speed of innovation and go-to-market motion are improving,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote immediately after I/O. Google’s stock, which sank as low as $88 per share in the wake of ChatGPT’s release, was trading above $122 by the time Pichai hit the stage in Mountain View.

But doubts persist. “Google has a lot of embedded advantages,” says Richard Kramer, founder of equity research firm Arete Research, noting its unrivaled A.I. research output and access to some of the world’s most advanced data centers. “They’re just not pursuing them as aggressively commercially as they could be.” Its divisions and product teams are too siloed, he adds, making it difficult to collaborate across the company. (So far, the most visible change to Google’s organizational structure that Pichai has made amid the A.I. upheaval has been merging the company’s two advanced A.I. efforts, Mountain View–based Google Brain and London-based DeepMind, into an entity called Google DeepMind.)

Arete analysts aren’t the only ones who think Google is falling short of its potential. Morgan Stanley noted that, despite the recent recovery, Alphabet suffers from “a valuation gap.” Its shares have historically traded at a premium to other Big Tech companies such as Apple, Meta, and Microsoft, but as of July, they were trading at a price/earnings multiple about 23% below those rivals. To many, that’s a clue that the market doesn’t believe Google can shrug off its A.I. malaise.

Newsletter-Gold-LineJack Krawczyk, 38, is a boomerang Googler. He joined the company in his twenties, then left in 2011 to work at a startup and, later, at streaming radio service Pandora and WeWork. He came back in 2020 to work on Google Assistant, Google’s answer to Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa.

Google’s LaMDA chatbot fascinated Krawczyk, who wondered if it could improve Assistant’s functionality. “I know I couldn’t shut up about it for most of 2022, if not 2021,” he says. What held the idea back, Krawczyk tells me, was reliability—that persistent problem of “hallucination.” Would users be okay with answers that sounded confident but were wrong?

“We were waiting for a moment where we got a signal to say, ‘I’m ready for an interaction that feels very convincing,’ ” says Krawczyk. “We started to see those signals” last fall, he says, coyly not mentioning that they included the giant flashing billboard of ChatGPT’s popularity.

Today Krawczyk is senior director of product on the Bard team. Although it drew on research Google had been developing for years, Bard was built fast following ChatGPT’s launch. The new chatbot was unveiled on Feb. 6, just days ahead of Microsoft’s debut of Bing Chat. The company won’t reveal how many people worked on the project. But some indications of the pressure the company was under have emerged.

One of the secrets to ChatGPT’s fluent responses is that they’re fine-tuned via a process called reinforcement learning through human feedback (RLHF). The idea is that humans rate a chatbot’s responses and the A.I. learns to tailor its output to better resemble the responses that get the best ratings. The more dialogues a company can train on, the better the chatbot is likely to be.

With ChatGPT having reached 100 million users in just two months, OpenAI had a big head start in those dialogues. To play catch-up, Google employed contract evaluators. Some of these contractors, who worked for outsourcing firm Appen, later filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, saying they had been fired for speaking out about low pay and unreasonable deadlines. One told the Washington Post that raters were given as little as five minutes to evaluate detailed answers from Bard on such complex topics as the origins of the Civil War. The contractors said they feared the time pressure would lead to flawed ratings and make Bard unsafe. Google has said the matter is between Appen and its employees and that the ratings are just one data point among many used to train and test Bard; the training continues apace. Other reports have claimed that Google tried to bootstrap Bard’s training by using answers from its rival, ChatGPT, that users had posted to a website called ShareGPT. Google denies using such data for training.

Unlike the new Bing, Bard was not designed to be a search tool, even though it can provide links to relevant internet sites. Bard’s purpose, Krawczyk says, is to serve as “a creative collaborator.” In his telling, Bard is primarily about retrieving ideas from your own mind. “It’s about taking that piece of information, that sort of abstract concept that you have in your head, and expanding it,” he says. “It’s about augmenting your imagination.” Google Search, Krawczyk says, is like a telescope; Bard is like a mirror.

“It’s about taking that piece of information, that sort of abstract concept that you have in your head, and expanding it. It’s about augmenting your imagination.”

JACK KRAWCZYK, SENIOR DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT ON THE BARD TEAM

Exactly what people are seeing in Bard’s mirror is hard to say. The chatbot’s debut was rocky: In the blog post announcing Bard, an accompanying screenshot of its output included an erroneous statement that the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, took the first pictures of a planet outside our solar system. (In fact, an Earth-based telescope achieved that feat in 2004.) It turned out to be a $100 billion mistake: That’s how much market value Alphabet lost in the 48 hours after journalists reported the error. Meanwhile, Google has warned its own staff not to put too much faith in Bard: In June it issued a memo reminding employees not to rely on coding suggestions from Bard or other chatbots without careful review.

Since Bard’s debut, Google has upgraded the A.I. powering the chatbot to its PaLM 2 LLM. According to testing Google has published, PaLM 2 outperforms OpenAI’s top model, GPT-4, on some reasoning, mathematical, and translation benchmarks. (Some independent evaluators have not been able to replicate those results.) Google also made changes that greatly improved Bard’s responses to math and coding queries. Krawczyk says that some of these changes have reduced Bard’s tendency to hallucinate, but that hallucination is far from solved. “There’s no best practice that is going to yield ‘x,’ ” he says. “It’s why Bard launched as an experiment.”

Google declined to reveal how many users Bard has. But third-party data offers signs of progress: Bard website visits increased from about 50 million in April to 142.6 million in June, according to Similarweb. That trails far behind ChatGPT’s 1.8 billion visits the same month. (In July, Google rolled Bard out to the European Union and Brazil and expanded its responses to cover 35 additional languages, including Chinese, Hindi, and Spanish.) Those numbers in turn pale beside those for Google’s main search engine, with 88 billion monthly visits and 8.5 billion daily search queries. Since the launch of Bing Chat, Google’s search market share has increased slightly, to 93.1%, while Bing’s is essentially unchanged at 2.8%, per data from StatCounter.

Newsletter-Gold-LineBing is far from the biggest threat A.I. poses to search. In a survey of 650 people in the U.S. in May, conducted by Bloomberg Intelligence, 60% of those between ages 16 and 34 said they preferred asking ChatGPT questions to using Google Search. “The younger age group may help drive a permanent shift in how search is used online,” says Mandeep Singh, senior technology analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.

That’s where SGE comes in. Google’s new generative A.I. tool allows users to find answers to more complex, multistep queries than they might have been able to with a traditional Google Search, according to Elizabeth Reid, Google’s vice president of Search.

There are plenty of kinks to work out—especially around speed. While Google Search returns results instantly, users have to wait frustratingly long seconds for SGE’s snapshot. “Part of the technology fun is working on the latency,” Reid told me, sardonically, during a demo before I/O. In a later interview, she said Google had made progress on speed, and noted that users might tolerate a brief delay before getting a clear answer from SGE, rather than spending 10 minutes clicking through multiple links to puzzle out an answer on their own.

Users have also caught SGE engaging in plagiarism—lifting answers verbatim from websites, and then not providing a link to the original source. That reflects a problem endemic to generative A.I. “What’s inherently tricky about the technology is it doesn’t actually always know where it knows things from,” Reid says. Google says it’s continuing to learn about SGE’s strengths and weaknesses, and to make improvements.

Google's VP of Search Liz Reid at Google's Mountain View campus in San Francisco, California on July 17, 2023.PHOTOGRAPH BY WINNI WINTERMEYER

The biggest issue is that Google doesn’t know if it can make as much money from ads around generative A.I. content as it has from traditional Search. “We are continuing to experiment with ads,” Reid says. This includes placing ads in different positions around the SGE page, as well as what Reid calls opportunities for “native” ads built into the snapshot answer—although Google will have to figure out how to make clear to users that a given portion of a response is paid for. Reid also said Google was thinking about how to add additional “exits” throughout the SGE page, providing more opportunities for people to link out to third-party websites.

The solution to that “exit” problem is of vital interest to publishers and advertisers who depend on Google’s search results to drive traffic to their sites—and who are already freaking out. With snapshot answers, people may be far less likely to click through on links. News publishers are particularly incensed: With its current LLM approach, Google essentially scrapes information from their sites, without compensation, and uses that data to build A.I. that may destroy their business. Many large news organizations have begun negotiations, seeking millions of dollars per year to grant Google access to their content. In July, the Associated Press became the first news organization to sign a deal of this kind with OpenAI, although financial terms were not disclosed. (Jordi Ribas, Microsoft’s head of search, told the audience at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in July that the company’s own data shows that users of Bing Chat are more likely to click on links than users of a traditional Bing search.)

Of course, if people don’t click through on links, that also poses an existential threat to Alphabet itself. It remains far from clear that the business model that drives 80% of Google’s revenues—advertising—is the best fit for chatbots and assistants. OpenAI, for example, has chosen a subscription model for its ChatGPT Plus service, charging users $20 per month. Alphabet has many subscription businesses, from YouTube Premium to various features in its Fitbit wearables. But none are anywhere near as lucrative as advertising.

Nor has the company grown any of them as quickly. Google’s non-advertising revenue, excluding its Cloud service and “other bets” companies, grew just 3.5% in 2022, to $29 billion, while ad revenue leaped ahead at twice that rate, to $224 billion. It’s also not clear that Google could convert a meaningful mass of people accustomed to free internet searches to become paying subscribers. Another ominous finding of Bloomberg Intelligence’s A.I. survey is that most people of all ages, 93%, said they would not want to pay more than $10 per month for access to an A.I. chatbot.

Newsletter-Gold-LineIf generative A.I. becomes a Search killer, where can Google look for growth? Its cloud business, for one, is likely to benefit. Google has long built its A.I. prowess into its cloud services, and analysts say the boom is perking up customer interest. Google was the only major cloud provider to gain market share in the past year, edging up to 11%. Google Cloud also turned a profit for the first time in the first quarter of 2023.

Still, Kramer of Arete Research notes that Google has a long way to go to catch its competitors. Amazon’s and Microsoft’s cloud offerings are both far bigger than Google’s and far more profitable. Plus, the A.I.-related competition is stiff: The ChatGPT buzz has led many business customers to seek out OpenAI’s LLM tech through Microsoft’s Azure Cloud.

More broadly, the generative A.I. moves Google has made so far have been mostly defensive, parries to the thrusts from OpenAI and Microsoft. To win the race for what comes next, Google will have to play offense. And many experts agree that what comes next is A.I. systems that don’t just generate content but take actions across the internet and operate software on behalf of a user. They will be “digital agents,” able to order groceries, book hotel rooms, and otherwise manage your life beyond the search page—Alexa or Siri on steroids.

“Whoever wins the personal agent, that’s the big thing, because you will never go to a search site again, you will never go to a productivity site, you’ll never go to Amazon again,” Bill Gates said in May. Gates said he’d be disappointed if Microsoft did not try to build an agent. He is also an investor in Inflection, a startup launched by DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman that says it aims to build everyone’s personal A.I. “chief of staff.”

Google has teased a forthcoming family of more powerful A.I. models called Gemini. Pichai has said Gemini will be “highly efficient at tool and API integrations,” a strong suggestion that it could power a digital agent. In another signal, Google’s DeepMind published research late in 2022 about an A.I. called Gato that experts see as a likely precursor to Gemini.

Krawczyk, from the Bard team, acknowledges the excitement around digital agents, but he notes that the assistant-to-agent transformation will require caution to manage within  Google’s mandate to be “responsible.” After all, an agent that acts in the real world can cause more harm than a mere text generator. Compounding the problem, people tend to be poor at giving instructions. “We often don’t provide enough context,” Krawczyk says. “We want these things to be able to read our minds. But they can’t.”

Google's Product Director Jack Krawczyk photographed at Google's Mountain View campus on July 18, 2023.PHOTOGRAPH BY WINNI WINTERMEYER

Precisely because of such concerns, regulation will shape Google’s future. In late July, the White House announced that seven top A.I. companies, including Google, were voluntarily committing to several steps around public transparency, safety testing, and security of their A.I. models. But Congress and the Biden administration may well impose additional guardrails. In the E.U., an A.I. Act nearing completion may pose challenges for Alphabet, by requiring transparency around A.I. training data and compliance with strict data privacy laws. Walker, Google’s global affairs chief, has the unenviable task of navigating these currents. “The race should be for the best A.I. regulation, not the first A.I. regulation,” he says, hinting at the long slog ahead.

Walker is a fan of Shakespeare, and in preparing to interview him, I asked Bard whether there were analogies from the work of that other bard that might encapsulate Alphabet’s current innovator’s dilemma. Bard suggested Prospero, from The Tempest. Like Alphabet, Prospero had been the dominant force on his island, using magic to rule, much as Alphabet had used its supremacy in search and earlier forms of A.I. to dominate its realm. Then Prospero’s magic summoned a storm that washed rivals onto his island—and his world was upended. A pretty apt analogy, actually.

But when I ask Walker about Shakespearean parallels for the current moment, he instead quotes a line from Macbeth in which Banquo says to the three witches, “If you can look into the seeds of time,/And say which grain will grow and which will not,/Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear/Your favors nor your hate.”

“That’s what A.I. does,” Walker says. “By looking at a million seeds, it can understand which ones are likely to grow and which ones are likely to not. So it’s a tool for helping us anticipate what might happen.”

But A.I. won’t be able to tell Walker or Pichai if Google has found a solution to the end of Search as we know it. For now, neither the bard nor Bard can answer that question.

This article appears in the August/September 2023 issue of Fortune with the headline, “Sundar Pichai and Google face their $160 billion dilemma.”

Google Devising Radical Search Changes to Beat Back A.I. Rivals

The tech giant is sprinting to protect its core business with a flurry of projects, including updates to its search engine and plans for an all-new one.

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A photo of the sign at Google's headquarters surrounded by trees.

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Laura Morton for The New York Times

By Nico Grant

Nico Grant, based in San Francisco, writes about Google and the technology industry.

April 16, 2023

Google’s employees were shocked when they learned in March that the South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung was considering replacing Google with Microsoft’s Bing as the default search engine on its devices.

For years, Bing had been a search engine also-ran. But it became a lot more interesting to industry insiders when it recently added new artificial intelligence technology.

Google’s reaction to the Samsung threat was “panic,” according to internal messages reviewed by The New York Times. An estimated $3 billion in annual revenue was at stake with the Samsung contract. An additional $20 billion is tied to a similar Apple contract that will be up for renewal this year.

A.I. competitors like the new Bing are quickly becoming the most serious threat to Google’s search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is racing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology. It is also upgrading the existing one with A.I. features, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times.

The new features, under the project name Magi, are being created by designers, engineers and executives working in so-called sprint rooms to tweak and test the latest versions. The new search engine would offer users a far more personalized experience than the company’s current service, attempting to anticipate users’ needs.

Lara Levin, a Google spokeswoman, said in a statement that “not every brainstorm deck or product idea leads to a launch, but as we’ve said before, we’re excited about bringing new A.I.-powered features to search, and will share more details soon.”

Billions of people use Google’s search engine every day for everything from finding restaurants and directions to understanding a medical diagnosis, and that simple white page with the company logo and an empty bar in the middle is one of the most widely used web pages in the world. Changes to it would have a significant impact on the lives of ordinary people, and until recently it was hard to imagine anything challenging it.

Google has been worried about A.I.-powered competitors since OpenAI, a San Francisco start-up that is working with Microsoft, demonstrated a chatbot called ChatGPT in November. About two weeks later, Google created a task force in its search division to start building A.I. products, said two people with knowledge of the efforts, who were not authorized to discuss them publicly.

Modernizing its search engine has become an obsession at Google, and the planned changes could put new A.I. technology in phones and homes all over the world.

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A hand holds a smartphone showing a screen for ChatGPT.

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Jackie Molloy for The New York Times

The Samsung threat represented the first potential crack in Google’s seemingly impregnable search business, which was worth $162 billion last year. Although it was not clear whether Microsoft’s work with A.I. was the main reason Samsung was considering a change after the last 12 years, that was the assumption inside Google. The contract is under negotiation, and Samsung could stick with Google.

But the idea that Samsung, which makes hundreds of millions of smartphones with Google’s Android software every year, would even consider switching search engines shocked Google’s employees.

After some workers were told that the company was looking for volunteers this month to help put together material for a pitch to Samsung, they reacted with emojis and surprise. “Wow, OK, that’s wild,” one person responded.

A Google spokesperson said that the company was continuously improving its search engine to give users and partners more reason to choose Google, and that Android phone makers were free to embrace technologies from different companies to improve their users’ experience.

Samsung and Microsoft declined to comment.

Google has been doing A.I. research for years. Its DeepMind lab in London is considered one of the best A.I. research centers in the world, and the company has been a pioneer with A.I. projects, such as self-driving cars and the so-called large language models that are used in the development of chatbots. In recent years, Google has used large language models to improve the quality of its search results, but held off on fully adopting A.I. because it has been prone to generating false and biased statements.

Now the priority is winning control of the industry’s next big thing. Last month, Google released its own chatbot, Bard, but the technology received mixed reviews.

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A screen shot of the upper right corner of a tab that says “Meet Bard” and a page that says “Bard Experiment.”

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Matt Rourke/Associated Press

Plans for the new search engine, which demonstrate Google’s ambitions to reimagine the search experience, are still in the early stages, with no clear timetable on when it will release the new search technology.

The system would learn what users want to know based on what they’re searching when they begin using it. And it would offer lists of preselected options for objects to buy, information to research and other information. It would also be more conversational — a bit like chatting with a helpful person.

But long before the search engine can be rebuilt, the Magi project will add features to the existing search engine, according to internal documents. Google has more than 160 people working full time on it, a person with knowledge of the work said.

Magi would keep ads in the mix of search results. Search queries that could lead to a financial transaction, such as buying shoes or booking a flight, for example, would still feature ads on their results pages.

That’s important for Google, since search ads are the primary way it makes money. Its chatbot, Bard, does not feature ads, and there has been anticipation in the tech industry that A.I. answers on search engines could make ads less relevant to users.

The planned search additions could also answer questions about software coding and write code based on a user’s request. Google may place an ad under the computer code answers, according to a document.

Last week, Google invited some employees to test Magi’s features, and it has encouraged them to ask the search engine follow-up questions to judge its ability to hold a conversation. Google is expected to release the tools to the public next month and add more features in the fall, according to the planning document.

The company plans to initially release the features to a maximum of one million people. That number should progressively increase to 30 million by the end of the year. The features will be available exclusively in the United States.

Google has also explored efforts to let people use Google Earth’s mapping technology with help from A.I. and search for music through a conversation with a chatbot, a Google director wrote in a document.

Other product ideas are in various stages of development. A tool called GIFI would use A.I. to generate images in Google Image results. Another tool, Tivoli Tutor, would teach users a new language through open-ended A.I. text conversations.

Yet another product, Searchalong, would let users ask a chatbot questions while surfing the web through Google’s Chrome browser. People might ask the chatbot for activities near an Airbnb rental, for example, and the A.I. would scan the page and the rest of the internet for a response.

Jim Lecinski, a former Google vice president of sales and service, said the company had been goaded into action and now had to convince users that it was as “powerful, competent and contemporary” as its competitors.

“If we are the leading search engine and this is a new attribute, a new feature, a new characteristic of search engines, we want to make sure that we’re in this race as well,” Mr. Lecinski, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University, said in an interview.

Daisuke Wakabayashi, Karen Weise and Tripp Mickle contributed reporting.

The A.I. Chatbot Race

In A.I. Race, Microsoft and Google Choose Speed Over Caution

April 7, 2023

The Chatbots Are Here, and the Internet Industry Is in a Tizzy

March 8, 2023

Google Releases Bard, Its Competitor in the Race to Create A.I. Chatbots

March 21, 2023

Nico Grant is a technology reporter covering Google from San Francisco. Previously, he spent five years at Bloomberg News, where he focused on Google and cloud computing. More about Nico Grant

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Janice Ruotolo commented April 18, 2023

J

Janice Ruotolo

NYApril 18, 2023

Can Google’s AI stop gmail spam?

16 Recommend

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leftyrite commented April 17, 2023

L

leftyrite

Bristol County, Mass.April 17, 2023

Thought we needed a new Teddy Roosevelt, and, in terms of support for green, we still do. but, Grover Cleveland was the guy who actually believed in fair and square--and in government. He worked generally from eight in the morning to well past midnight, just about every day. He believed in what he was about. When you look at this nonsense of foisting unproved technology upon us all so as not to lose market share, with not a millisecond to waste, it becomes clear that we need to support true reform of the digital monopolies.

10 Recommend

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Brendan commented April 17, 2023

B

Brendan

Seattle, WAApril 17, 2023

Google is in real trouble. I don't know that they have a year to figure this stuff out as they seem to think. I also kind of doubt they can catch up in that time. Google's search results have gotten progressively worse over time, as they have failed to keep pace with people gaming the results via SEO. Bing has not only solved this problem, but by using AI they've gone far beyond what search engines could do in the past. Right now the saving grace is that access to bing chat is limited. You have to apply for access. Bing chat is also somewhat slow. My guess is that Microsoft is building up big server farms with NVIDIA GPUs as we speak.

8 Recommend

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John Doe commented April 17, 2023

J

John Doe

SFApril 17, 2023

Who thought that competition is a good idea? I thought people liked it when the internet was owned by a single company.

5 Recommend

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M-in-Vegas commented April 17, 2023

M

M-in-Vegas

Las Vegas, NVApril 17, 2023

Google Search has been beyond terrible for 4+ years now, "correcting" my spelling incorrectly, and taking my boolean searches as suggestions rather than demands (when it takes them at all). And forget finding anything that's more than a few years old. If you want an endless list of spam suggestions that have nothing to do with what you're looking for, Google's the place. If you want accurate searching, even DuckDuckGo is superior. I don't want AI in searches; I want a search engine to find ALL my search terms precisely as I wrote them. When searching becomes a guessing game for the search engine, it's no longer "searching," it's guessing. (Google Maps, otoh, is still unrivaled.)

18 Recommend

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nomad _manhattan commented April 17, 2023

N

nomad _manhattan

NYCApril 17, 2023

Has people at Samsung tried BARD and compared that with Bing search experiences before making this decision? Also MSFT has little if very unsuccessful smartphone experience (hello Window's phone). How well they understand UX on smaller screen and devices is untested. Feels a FOMO move rather than a careful decision based on data or user research.

2 Recommend

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Yankees Fan Inside Red Sox Nation commented April 17, 2023

Y

Yankees Fan Inside Red Sox Nation

MassachusettsApril 17, 2023

"I need a new pickup with strong off-road capabilities for under 50K. What's your best deal today?" Here's a potential "killer bot" for Magi, one that would give Google an enormous revenue stream: a talking, visible and totally knowledgeable AI-generated chameleon car salesbot instantly tailored to the customer's known age, race, gender, interests and so on! Car customers have many questions. They might be asking about specific features of the product, or they might be asking about how the product compares with its competitors. The friendly, compatible AI-generated salesbot will use every method it can to induce the customer it is "talking" to "face" to face right on the screen into making a deal RIGHT NOW. It will never take "no" for an answer, and it will always know the right questions to ask to close the customer. Now imagine the "ca-ching" in the minds of car manufacturers and dealers at the thought that they can replace expensive salespeople they need to train, feed and support with the all-knowing shape-changing Magi salesbot, instantly AI-generated to close that particular customer. That's just for starters. How about car insurance, life insurance, and health insurance? All complex subjects, totally ideal for these AI bots. And if you can sell a car this way, why not a house too? And these AI-generated salesbots, way smarter and a thousand times more diligent and determined than mere humans, can make deals 24/7 for the Google Magi client. Coming soon.

3 Recommend

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Bill commented April 17, 2023

B

Bill

FLApril 17, 2023

Remember vaporware, the usually-mythical software companies claimed would instantly obsolete the existing software of other companies, thus causing customers to wait for the latest thing, which often never appeared or, when it appeared, was not as great as promised. Of course Google has to claim that what it’s working on will be better than ChatGPT or other AI rivals, but the proof of the pudding will be in what Google actually rolls out now and in the fall. Laying off thousands of high-paid workers means Google has a lot of money to invest in new products; I suppose we could all be pleasantly surprised by Magi.

3 Recommend

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Anonymous commented April 17, 2023

A

Anonymous

MidWestApril 17, 2023

Competition is great and this is just a great example of it. Google had never been as incentivized to improve their product and listen to their customers as it is now that a true potential competitor has emerged. At the same time, I believe that it is not accurate to describe the $3bn dollar with Samsung as revenue for Google. I believe that these are actually "traffic-acquisition costs paid out by parent company Alphabet Inc" (WSJ dixit). The push from Samsung is more about getting paid more money by Alphabet than anything else. Thus, this will have an even bigger impact in Alphabet's bottom line than if it was revenue decline.

2 Recommend

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Anonymous commented April 17, 2023

A

Anonymous

MidWestApril 17, 2023

Competition is great and this is just a great example of it. Google had never been as incentivized to improve their product and listen to their customers as it is now that a true potential competitor has emerged. At the same time, I believe that it is not accurate to describe the $3bn dollar with Samsung as revenue for Google. I believe that these are actually "traffic-acquisition costs paid out by parent company Alphabet Inc" (WSJ dixit). The push from Samsung is more about getting paid more money by Alphabet than anything else. Thus, this will have an even bigger impact in Alphabet's bottom line than if it was revenue decline.

Recommend

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John Joseph Laffiteau MS in Econ commented April 17, 2023

J

John Joseph Laffiteau MS in Econ

APS08April 17, 2023

A caveat emptor label seems appropriate for many ads that accompany search engines that use the concept of psychological targeting. The March-April 2023 issue of the Harvard Business Review in an article titled: "What Psychological Targeting Can Do," (p.126) by Sandra Matz, states that: "Psychological targeting-- the practice of influencing people's behavior through interventions aimed at personality traits-- has come of age as a marketing tool thanks to an explosion in data that provides insight into consumer psyches." Per Ms. Matz, this type of targeting can grow revenues by helping firms communicate in a way that resonates with customers. But, if these customers feel they are being manipulated or their data is being harvested without their consent, then the advertisers must be prepared for a backlash. She adds: "Putting aide measurement errors, the customer's personality assessment, from which purchasing preferences can be inferred, should always be roughly the same." [04/17/2023 Mon. 3:30 pm Greenville NC]

2 Recommend

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Joe Psotka commented April 17, 2023

J

Joe Psotka

Rockville MdApril 17, 2023

The AI race between Google and MrSoftee is so sweet. I love it. Amazon, Meta, and the Chinese are all out in the cold.

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Someplace commented April 17, 2023

S

Someplace

In natureApril 17, 2023

Google wants us to live in a bubble. No, thank you,

7 Recommend

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tartanhabit commented April 17, 2023

T

tartanhabit

Bay AreaApril 17, 2023

It's fabulous to see how opinionated everyone is about FREE products and the expectations we have of Google and other companies. Yes, if you are paying for them as a business, that's a different matter but if you get to use them as an individual consumer, you get to choose to use them or not. It's free either way.

4 Recommend

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4 REPLIES

John commented April 17, 2023

J

John

MTApril 17, 2023

@tartanhabit Google buys up companies that would have competed via better products for us, so they are hurting you whether or not you use their services.

3 Recommend

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tartanhabit commented April 17, 2023

T

tartanhabit

Bay AreaApril 17, 2023

@John I've had over a decade of getting what I need when I need it for free so I'm doing ok out of it.

Recommend

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Bob R commented April 18, 2023

B

Bob R

Portland, MEApril 18, 2023

@tartanhabit You really think it's free?

1 Recommend

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John commented April 17, 2023

J

John

ORApril 17, 2023

Are they going back to "do no harm?"

2 Recommend

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jerry lee commented April 17, 2023

J

jerry lee

rochester nyApril 17, 2023

Reality Check dont underestimate techolgy is the net. As speed of net increses to speed human brain an beyound there will be changes. Those who adapt will do fine but rest us wont who cant support our lives. Having job an abilty to gainfully employed might prove difficult when ai can do more for less.

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Mike Carpenter commented April 17, 2023

M

Mike Carpenter

Tucson, AZApril 17, 2023

Used to be a search engine. Now just a money grubbing ad campaign that prevents us from finding what we're searching for.

21 Recommend

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Paul commented April 17, 2023

P

Paul

PhiladelphiaApril 17, 2023

Just don't follow NIH's Pubmed. They are still using an 8086 computer.

2 Recommend

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pumpkineater39 commented April 17, 2023

P

pumpkineater39

puget soundApril 17, 2023

Now just WHY...do I suspect, We the People, will get a 1s & 0s SHAFT, in all this??? Wouldnt it be 'more efficient' to just put an RFID chip, with YouTube video abilities in everyone's head?

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John Fourier commented April 17, 2023

J

John Fourier

WashingtonApril 17, 2023

I've been using Bing AI (powered by ChatGPT) since shortly after it became available. It's fabulous. I rarely use a regular search engine anymore. It's like talking to a wise, eager to help, sometimes skeptical librarian who can find what you need instantly, summarize it well, give associated references, and make valuable suggestions. Yes, it makes mistakes sometimes, but if you challenge it, it can often correct them. It's an extremely useful research tool. But it's more than that: its conversational style and friendliness can be genuinely encouraging. This is a huge step forwards.

10 Recommend

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3 REPLIES

L commented April 17, 2023

L

L

LovApril 17, 2023

“Makes mistakes sometimes” is a very generous way of saying “makes egregious factual errors frequently.” This tech isn’t ready for prime time, but it’s being forced on us because everyone making it wants to be first to market.

5 Recommend

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Someone commented April 17, 2023

S

Someone

Grand Rapids, MichiganApril 17, 2023

@John Fourier: I had a very different experience with the “new” Bing. I simply asked it to compile a playlist of the most popular songs from a certain well-known performer. After thinking about it for a minute, Bing said he “couldn’t do that right now “ and what other topics did I want to discuss? I told him he had said I could ask him “anything”, and he replied that I could, as long as my question was “polite “ and “respectful”. I was not impressed. Meh.

4 Recommend

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Bob R commented April 18, 2023

B

Bob R

Portland, MEApril 18, 2023

@Someone If that's an example of how Bing/AI operates, I want no part of it.

2 Recommend

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Hanh commented April 17, 2023

H

Hanh

LA CaliforniaApril 17, 2023

I have been using ChatGPT for various personal tasks ever since it became available to the public then recently tried Bing which required me to download Microsoft Edge and so on. Nope! I am sticking with Google as a quick search engine and will continue to use CatGPT for my personalized inquiries - at least for now.

1 Recommend

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1 REPLY

Steven W. Giovinco, Recover Reputation commented April 17, 2023

S

Steven W. Giovinco, Recover Reputation

New York, NYApril 17, 2023

@Hanh Can't wait to try CatGPT :)

2 Recommend

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Joe Psotka commented April 17, 2023

J

Joe Psotka

Rockville MdApril 17, 2023

The difficulty people will have with AI is that is deals with probabilities and not certainties, just like the human mind. Most people think they are rational and use logic, but that is just wrong. We depend on induction which means that EVERYTHING we think is wrong (as David Hume clearly recognized 300 years ago). Most of what we think is unconscious and only rises to consciousness in a small part. We have very little privileged access to what we think or why, just as AI does, so we shouldn't be too upset when AI does weird things, just as we do, but most people generally are. We will all mainly have a tought time for the next few decades as AI takes over most of our jobs and consciousness. Only the truly thoughtful will be prepared.

3 Recommend

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Jeffrey commented April 17, 2023

J

Jeffrey

NJApril 17, 2023

Search has a number of problems for which AI can not solve: -Proliferation of ads clogging the screen real estate (although this is mitigated by not using Chrome, using uBlock, and if you can a DNS Ad blocking tool) -Search personalization: This is the search provider trying to predict what might be important or useful to you. It can be helpful as an option, but I find it tends to end up hiding things that are useful -The internet itself: The internet is way more consolidated and information isn't spread around as much Add in SEO and you get a list of garbage links. Generally, you can find what you need on Reddit, Stack Exchange, or Wikipedia and I find searching those places directly (or telling the search engine to search them directly) more useful.

6 Recommend

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Swamp Yankee commented April 17, 2023

S

Swamp Yankee

Haddam Neck CTApril 17, 2023

Google stumbling is disconcerting. Rushing to catch up is even more disconcerting. GM was like a whale bleeding to death but didn't know it - i.e. too big to feel much of anything. And leadership in a remote ivory tower. So odd, living in a world where what is current is more important than anything and somehow loosing touch.

1 Recommend

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Inquiring Mind commented April 17, 2023

I

Inquiring Mind

USAApril 17, 2023

If you snooze, you lose in the tech industry. Google snoozed on AI and is finding itself in catch-up mode. That's unfortunate for them, because OpenAI's ChatGPT has not only been in heavy use but is also being finessed along the way. The worrisome thing about Google's sudden sprint is the possibility that the product will present concerning problems at its core. Fingers crossed! The new tech race is on!

2 Recommend

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Bob Jones commented April 17, 2023

Bob Jones

Bob Jones

Lafayette, CAApril 17, 2023

Tripping over each other in the lurch to profit from the Next Thing. Let’s stop pretending this has anything to do with helping humanity.

2 Recommend

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John commented April 17, 2023

J

John

mtApril 17, 2023

This goes to show just how important competition is to actually improve the goods and services that consumers have access to. Imagine how many of those acquisitions by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc were done solely for the purpose of not needing to improve their existing technology and services. We need to seriously look at the monopolistic tech environment. It's holding back progress - us individual consumers can be better off than it currently is!

3 Recommend

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Hugo Pena commented April 17, 2023

H

Hugo Pena

MexicoApril 17, 2023

Great to see Google is working hard on new products, for me Search works great as other products: Maps, Docs, Translate, etc, the ads are not an issue to find what I’m looking for.

1 Recommend

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Ivermarkt commented April 17, 2023

Ivermarkt

Ivermarkt

PasadenaApril 17, 2023

I confess that I use a search engine to finish the NYT crossword puzzle each day. Switching screens is getting tedious so maybe the next generation search engine will just do the whole thing for me with a single tap. What a relief to clear that from my calendar each day.

2 Recommend

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Connie Anderson commented April 17, 2023

C

Connie Anderson

COApril 17, 2023

It hasn't even been a month since the open letter was published on March 29, 2023. "In an open letter signed by Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, technology leaders urged for a six-month pause to the development of such advanced AI, saying it represents a risk to society." No matter what company is developing, experimenting and producing; no matter what AI tool is misquoting, spreading misinformation, and lies; borrowing humans' words, ideas, art, and music and then calling it an AI creation; the whole idea and process threaten our human existence. In the face of such technology, the word human is being erased by a machine. I object.

8 Recommend

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1 REPLY

Stan Sutton commented April 17, 2023

S

Stan Sutton

Westchester, NYApril 17, 2023

I don’t believe that it’s that simple. There is AI that is good and people who are bad. We worry about SkyNet waging war on the human race but so far no AI has shot a person for ringing the wrong doorbell. Society is already a threat to society. With or without AI that’s not going to change. (And if you outlaw AI then only outlaws will have AI.)

4 Recommend

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Upstater commented April 17, 2023

U

Upstater

NYApril 17, 2023

Back when search engines were useful, adding more words to your query brought more focused results. Now the opposite happens. You see more irrelevant results, presumably from more places that paid for better placement.

23 Recommend

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1 REPLY

Joe Psotka commented April 17, 2023

J

Joe Psotka

Rockville MdApril 17, 2023

@Upstater Just wrong on all counts. It is great to be able to use whole sentences and paragraphs in search at last.

Recommend

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RO commented April 17, 2023

R

RO

IsraelApril 17, 2023

The perception that Google is behind in the "AI Race" is really the main take away for me (even though they are not). They reacted really badly, and apparently still are. Productizing AI at this point is, well, just not irresponsible (because we have no idea what goes on under the hood, really) but also probably confines the field too early. We need the best minds working on the fundamentals, still, not on making a better product. (ML scientist) BTW, there are great alternatives to Google's products: -DuckDuckGO for search (especially if you know which site you want to search in) -Proton Mail for email (really no reason to use gmail)

3 Recommend

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Steve commented April 17, 2023

S

Steve

OregonApril 17, 2023

Google search results have been terrible for years for anything other than Pinterest and shopping, all the result of the “AI” they insisted on using. I have zero confidence in then improving anything. Google’s core business is advertising, and nothing else.

15 Recommend

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Matt commented April 17, 2023

M

Matt

MarylandApril 17, 2023

I recently had a technical support chat with what I believe was an AI bot at Google. In 4 "conversations" the bot never understood what I was asking about - using something called a Content Security Policy (CSP) to protect webpages - while also allowing their javascript to run (Google was one of the partners in engineering the CSP too). I was asking about a specific technical hurdle I was having with one particular product of theirs, gave samples with solutions from other Google product pages, and asked for something similar. The bot focused on me like I was a new user and referred me to their product install instructions page - sort of like there were an email messaging FAQ machine. In the end I had to stop using their product because they apparently don't support it. The feeling I was left with was I was at the Dept of Motor Vehicles or the Post Office, with the good old shoulder shrugs

5 Recommend

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Larry commented April 17, 2023

L

Larry

HunterdonApril 17, 2023

At one time Google was super, that is, before it started pushing ad-related query results to the top and obscuring the rest. Most users have learned to subconsciously ID them and move beyond that. Alas, but still, the real gems that consumers wish for are buried on page 9 or worse, a link on page 9. Such is life in a for-profit, dumbed-down society.

14 Recommend

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Gwen commented April 17, 2023

G

Gwen

SeattleApril 17, 2023

Amazing , after years of using consumers as beta tester for their products and being happy with the other FANG companies of slow incremental updates on their “ smart devices “ , they magically found some AI projects out of the magic hat and now are going to offer products consumers have been wanting for years. The FANG gang has been exposed for what we have been accusing them for years that what they have spending money on was to monitor our web activities simply to monetize it and not to offer products that would really help us in our every day lives

3 Recommend

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Concerned Reader commented April 17, 2023

C

Concerned Reader

USAApril 17, 2023

This might help some of the commenters here: install AdBlock plus (it's free). Also, if you want good (i.e., relevant) search results, be very generous with the keywords you input. This is all probably obvious to most of you, but some comments here suggest a lack of AdBlock and an underdeveloped Google-fu.

7 Recommend

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Ralph commented April 17, 2023

R

Ralph

ColoradoApril 17, 2023

The threat to Google searches isn’t AI, it’s the bogus, unwanted and unreliable results that Google queries are increasingly returning. Any query I compose that contains a word that includes a word that might refer to a salable product will result in a slew of adds at the top of my queue. Words that obviously refer to the subject of my interest are frequently ignored. Yes, eventually, after a few restates of my query, or scrolling down further in the queue, I will find what I’m searching for, but the process leaves a bad taste. I have recently switched to Bing with its AI assistance and I’m not all that impressed. Still, at least those queries seem to take the entirety of my query into account.

13 Recommend

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Brian commented April 17, 2023

B

Brian

San FranciscoApril 17, 2023

Often an individual has one stroke of inspiration that leads to unbounded success until a threat arises. The threat will either result in a new dynamic and continued success, or slow demise as the threat becomes the dominant player. Will Google change or double-down on what could be yesterday’s winning strategy? We will all be watching.

3 Recommend

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Jim K commented April 17, 2023

J

Jim K

San JoseApril 17, 2023

Google should be panicking; their own search has been degrading over the the last decade to an annoyance rather than a useful tool. Between ad promotion and page-rank sending you everything everyone else is searching for it now becomes more and more difficult to search for anything even slightly obscure, something that it was once excellent at. The fading usefulness and built-in privacy issues drove me away to duck duck go a couple of years ago. Had Google focused on building better capability into its search rather than grasping to monetize every last cent of theoretically possible revenue they should have easily been able to maintain their primacy.

9 Recommend

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mattiaw commented April 17, 2023

M

mattiaw

Floral ParkApril 17, 2023

I use Google search every day. I am so used to avoiding the ads that it is almost as if they aren't there. Google search, completely searchable gmail and YouTube ( especially YouTube for a home owner ) are a God Send. Microsoft, on the other hand, is ridiculous: always bringing up the Edge browser with the dizzying busy screen, and making it extremely difficult to make Google the default search engine. No wonder they have to rely on another company for AI. I don't trust Microsoft as I have watched them develop over decades. They were always this way.

8 Recommend

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joe Hall commented April 17, 2023

J

joe Hall

estes park, coApril 17, 2023

Google's search engine has been awful for well over a decade. Their search ONLY favors those who advertise with them, and it gets worse daily.

12 Recommend

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Vasari commented April 17, 2023

V

Vasari

NYCApril 17, 2023

I am heartened to see that the posts here are roundly critical of the garbage search results Google is providing these days. Google has completely debased itself in terms of pushing sponsored ads to the top and destroying small businesses that thrived online in the process. Google is determined to kill off organic search entirely and replace it with a directory of ads, and the company uses every underhanded method it can devise to accomplish that. It then forces the same businesses it is squeezing to death to pay Google for ads to replace their decimated traffic and sales. Meanwhile, Google's pay per click ad prices have skyrocketed and the great majority of the actual clicks are straight-up fraudulent...that has been my own experience, and there is a lot of documented evidence of this out there (just Google it). Google is a monopoly and exhibits monopolistic practices in every way...but our barely literate members of Congress are not really bright enough to understand how any of this works so nothing has been done to resolve the problem. The best possible thing that can happen now is that other companies start to force Google into change and split up the company's monopoly position. I, like many small and medium-sized business owners, fear that what comes next with AI will be even worse than what we currently have with Google.

37 Recommend

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Linda commented April 17, 2023

L

Linda

Asheville, NCApril 17, 2023

I'm tired of wading through a page of ads before I can get to the search results. I understand that there have to be ads, but put them in a sidebar. Google prioritizes the ads over the search results.

10 Recommend

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1 REPLY

Matt commented April 17, 2023

M

Matt

MarylandApril 17, 2023

@Linda There is barely any search results sometimes. You need a magnifying glass to see between all of the ads. Used to be a few, then they enlarged to place on right hand side. Now ads are so prevalent, the content is completely lost.

2 Recommend

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Jeff commented April 17, 2023

J

Jeff

WAApril 17, 2023

I will pay a subscription fee to gain access to a competent search engine that does not rely on ads. Advertising is the bane of the internet. And... I do not want a search engine, or any aspect of my computer, to learn my desires and habits, to "chat" with me, or to do my thinking in any way shape or form. I'd like to keep my brain my own, thank you very much google.

18 Recommend

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3 REPLIES

lastcard jb commented April 17, 2023

L

lastcard jb

westport ctApril 17, 2023

@Jeff News flash Jeff. " I do not want a search engine, or any aspect of my computer, to learn my desires and habits, to "chat" with me, or to do my thinking in any way shape or form". then you had better simply get off the internet and go back to the library. ALL search engines or online platforms are engineered to see, hear and respond to your specific desires - thats basic. It will simply come down to ease of use and accuracy of results. Google does that. Just like APPLE vs anyone else. Ease of use .

2 Recommend

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Will in Santa Monica commented April 17, 2023

W

Will in Santa Monica

Santa Monica, CAApril 17, 2023

@Jeff You can already pay a small fee to use an ad-free search engine: Neeva.

1 Recommend

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lastcard jb commented April 17, 2023

L

lastcard jb

westport ctApril 17, 2023

@Will in Santa Monica ad free doesn't mean intelligence gathering free. Data = Dollars. simple

Recommend

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Mannyv commented April 17, 2023

M

Mannyv

PortlandApril 17, 2023

Google will lose because it doesn't know who its customers are. Google's customers used to be people. Now are their customers the OEMs? Samsung? The advertisers? AI search will destroy the search advertising business, because you won't have to go to the other page. No page view means no ad view, which means no revenue. I'm sure there are teams tasked to find a way to insert ads into the results...but the solution will be even less user-friendly than what they have now, and this solution will fail in the market.

6 Recommend

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Jim commented April 17, 2023

J

Jim

Seattle, WAApril 17, 2023

Sorry but I'm not rooting for their success. They've been abusing content creators for years, pitting them against each other to pay up ever more just to appear in a visible spot in their search results. On top of that, advertising revenue for publishers has been going down for many years, as Google not only cornered the ad market together with Facebook but they made a secret cartel deal (Jedi Blue) to maximize their profits as middle men, all while the FTC and DOJ relinquished their antitrust duties.

23 Recommend

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Steven W. Giovinco, Recover Reputation commented April 17, 2023

S

Steven W. Giovinco, Recover Reputation

New York, NYApril 17, 2023

Quality and asking questions in a natural way are key takeaways and focus on these in order to stay relevant online.

5 Recommend

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Vin commented April 17, 2023

V

Vin

NycApril 17, 2023

Competition will do Google a world of good. It's no secret that its search engine has become pretty useless for all but the most rudimentary of searches - the results full of ads, SEO and sponsored posts.

13 Recommend

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Jo Shmoe commented April 17, 2023

Jo Shmoe

Jo Shmoe

AmericaApril 17, 2023

Maybe too little too late. Google is a blobby monopoly that deserves to lose market share. The are old an uncreative,.

4 Recommend

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1 REPLY

lastcard jb commented April 17, 2023

L

lastcard jb

westport ctApril 17, 2023

@Jo Shmoe old and uncreative? Google has been around for 24 years which means its very creative and smart? Ask Jeeves? RedHat? Bing? DuckDuck go? Yahoo? I mean please, Google has become synonymous with search. Just Google it. It's a verb.

1 Recommend

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Ava commented April 17, 2023

A

Ava

North CarolinaApril 17, 2023

Google has become useless. I'm ready for its replacement.

3 Recommend

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CynicalObserver commented April 17, 2023

C

CynicalObserver

RochesterApril 17, 2023

Everything you type into a computer free of charge has the potential to be monetized by someone else. Including this posting. Think about that for once and decide whether you like that or not.

7 Recommend

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jim commented April 17, 2023

jim

jim

jersey cityApril 17, 2023

"...it would offer lists of preselected options for objects to buy, information to research and other information." In other words, it will attempt to sell you something else. I don't call that 'enhanced' search, I call that annoying.

9 Recommend

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RWS commented April 17, 2023

R

RWS

MichiganApril 17, 2023

So much attention and drama given to Search Engines and AI still boggles me. It's just software with more associations considered to refine results and use those results to market stuff or convert the results into a story (aka the "intelligence"). I suppose the drama comes from people actually thinking it's more than that and can be applied to many tasks to which it's totally incapable.

4 Recommend

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professorguy commented April 17, 2023

P

professorguy

north countryApril 17, 2023

C'mon, we know exactly what to expect from these tools. If you want it to find the best deal on a widget, the tool will find the one that makes THE AI OWNER the maximum profit--you know, just like today's regular search results. Why would anyone think these tools will work for the user? No other search engine does.

14 Recommend

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Charleston Yank commented April 17, 2023

Charleston Yank

Charleston Yank

Charleston, SCApril 17, 2023

I'm still a Google search fan, but just by a bit. I have always used both Google and Bing search tools and for the past 3 months pretty evenly for my searches. I find that Google still beats Bing but less so than 2 years ago. I think both AI tools are mostly useless so far for serious searching and information gathering. That said I think we are getting closer to having a real conversation to gather information with the AI tools hopefully the same as we would gather information when talking to an expert.

1 Recommend

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Jason McDonald commented April 17, 2023

J

Jason McDonald

FremontApril 17, 2023

AI may be the next big thing, or it may be the next EFT / Crypto... beanie baby... And/or both. It's far too early to tell what it's true impact will be, including with Google search. That the herd animals of Silicon Valley and the Media have turned the hype level to "11" - Now, that is predictable.

2 Recommend

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Woody Guthrie commented April 17, 2023

Woody Guthrie

Woody Guthrie

Cranford, NJApril 17, 2023

Google's search engine is garbage, polluted with "Sponsored" results for the first page and more. It cannot be trusted and has been terrible for a long time.

35 Recommend

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Laurence commented April 17, 2023

L

Laurence

Duvall, WAApril 17, 2023

Amazed that nobody has noticed that bing is superior to google on medical and biological searches. We need BOTH of them.

5 Recommend

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1 REPLY

AZYankee commented April 17, 2023

AZYankee

AZYankee

ScottsdaleApril 17, 2023

@Laurence Actually this is very useful to know! Thanks for pointing this out.

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Christatos commented April 17, 2023

C

Christatos

US of AApril 17, 2023

Yeah, but when I enter a search for “Sweden”, will I still get dozens of hotel ads and dozens of TripAdvisor reviews before I get any useful results? I seriously doubt it.

18 Recommend

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1 REPLY

Charleston Yank commented April 17, 2023

Charleston Yank

Charleston Yank

Charleston, SCApril 17, 2023

@Christatos I hear you but how do you think search of for that matter broadcast TV is given to you free, it is ads. Without ads no google or bing search.

2 Recommend

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DavidV commented April 17, 2023

D

DavidV

CincinnatiApril 17, 2023

I stopped using Facebook about 10 years ago, have never used Twitter, and been sticking with Yahoo! search rather than moving on to their "more responsive, personalized" competitors. I DON'T WANT A PERSONALIZED "EXPERIENCE"!! I don't want to find myself in an echo chamber. I positively cringe when I see search "results" containing products whose ad or YouTube video I clicked on yesterday (sometimes accidentally). I use a VPN to protect my home automation, and always get a chuckle when I see ads or search results related to whatever city I appear to be in. PLEASE: just leave me alone - STOP improving my life - DON'T keep trying to enhance my experiences. I'm just fine, and I'll continue to be fine if you just leave me alone!

161 Recommend

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4 REPLIES

Fred Goldstein commented April 17, 2023

F

Fred Goldstein

MassachusettsApril 17, 2023

@DavidV Amen Amen Amen!!! So-called personalized advertising is the bane of the Internet. I don't want those clicks following me around. The most useful ads are the ones that are in context of the page they're on, which was what Google's original AdWords supposedly did. But most ad tech today is stalker advertising, following the user around. Personalized search would be just as bad. Any two people entering the same search terms should get the same results, not what a stalker thinks will result in more sales of polyester pants or riding lawnmowers. DuckDuckGo mostly feeds up Bing search results, which are pretty good, and they only sell your data to Microsoft, as its price for Bing access, not to everyone else. Such filtered alternatives may become even more popular if "personalized" search becomes more common.

6 Recommend

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Midwest Confidential commented April 17, 2023

M

Midwest Confidential

OmahaApril 17, 2023

I’ve used only DuckDuckGo for years and I really like it. When I think of Google, it is for Gmail, Docs, and the other components of the “G suite”, which are so much more nicely integrated than the Microsoft tools they were based on.

1 Recommend

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John Brown commented April 17, 2023

J

John Brown

Washington D.C.April 17, 2023

@DavidV Anyone who uses a VPN is either in the clandestine services, a criminal, or clinically paranoid.

2 Recommend

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Toby commented April 17, 2023

T

Toby

San DiegoApril 17, 2023

As google caters to the big corporations that want to sell you something and AI throws you into an echo chamber of mind control, it will become useless. The next thing you know Google will be making suggestions on what you might search for because you can’t figure that out for yourself.

17 Recommend

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jeffothetechnoptimist commented April 17, 2023

J

jeffothetechnoptimist

NYCApril 17, 2023

I have been using the new Bing (mostly in chat mode), and for me it is a real game changer in information retrieval. All Search engines until now respond to a short query with pages of links and some number of ads interspersed. As a user, I scroll and filter out the ads and the spam and hope to find a page that has my answer, requiring a lot of back and forth. It works well enough most of the time. But Bing in Chat mode delivers an answer. One answer that may pull info from many places, but an answer. And if it is not quite right, which is sometimes the case, then I can slightly refine what I want, and it gives me that. The experience of using it is completely unlike the search-and-hope experience of traditional search engines. The fact that it is also conversational (based on its competence with the language model) may seem creepy to some folks, but it's not actually "intelligence" so much as a parlor trick to appear intelligent. And it really does make the act of finding things on the internet so much more natural for this particular human. Google changed the game once upon a time, and now the game has changed again. Game on! It will be better for all of us.

51 Recommend

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4 REPLIES

Jcb commented April 17, 2023

J

Jcb

NYApril 17, 2023

I can definitely see the utility but how do you know you are getting a good/correct answer with a chat bot? With traditional search engines I can scan multiple sources quickly to evaluate an answer.

11 Recommend

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Sigmund123 commented April 17, 2023

Sigmund123

Sigmund123

New YorkApril 17, 2023

@jeffothetechnoptimist Dropped the link to this article into Bing. Got the following "takeaways". Welcome back! Here are some takeaways from this page. Google is racing to protect its core business with a flurry of projects, including updates to its search engine and plans for an all-new one. The tech giant is worried about A.I.-powered competitors like Bing, ChatGPT, Bard, Ernie, and GPT-4, which can generate text, images, code, and translations with little or no human input. Google has been shocked, panicked, and obsessed with A.I. since OpenAI demonstrated ChatGPT in November, and especially after Samsung considered replacing Google with Bing as the default search engine on its devices.

3 Recommend

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Shawn commented April 17, 2023

S

Shawn

MAApril 17, 2023

Yeah, just as an example: Going to Montreal for vacation and wondered what month would be best for temperature. I was able to quickly get the info into an easy to see format, telling it to put high and low temps (just F, not C) into a table by month. Then tell it to take away all the rows but April-July and it just did it.

3 Recommend

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Urbie4 commented April 17, 2023

U

Urbie4

RIApril 17, 2023

How about... make a search engine that's useful, again? They're all terrible for finding information, anymore. Search engines used to be great, but now, they're just ad servers. I just automatically tack "wikipedia" onto pretty much every search phrase -- not that I'm a big fan of Wikipedia, but it just weeds out (most of) the ads that otherwise are ALL YOU GET in your search results. And before you start in with, "If you're not paying money, you're the product," we know that. But I'm saying 20-25 years ago, search engines actually searched for, and found, what you were looking for, even though they were free. Imagine that.

60 Recommend

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4 REPLIES

Preson commented April 17, 2023

P

Preson

BrooklynApril 17, 2023

Free, as in gratis, ended on the Internet long ago. The academics tried to warn us against commercializing the Internet, bless their souls. But we wanted to relive the glory days of westward expansion. We saw virgin territory that we deserved to exploit--our Manifest Destiny. We wanted something that generated wealth--not a digital lending library or public square. So, this is what we got: disruption, fraud, and crass commercialism. In other words, a virtual world modeled on the marketplace we see in meatspace. Caveat emptor!

12 Recommend

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C Wolfe commented April 17, 2023

C Wolfe

C Wolfe

Bloomington INApril 17, 2023

@Urbie4 Yes, I miss the days when I could search for what I actually wanted to find rather than the search engine deciding I was really looking for something else. It became more difficult, if not impossible, to construct an effective search on a topic that isn't commonly searched. And yes, we should be concerned about using Wikipedia as the go-to information source. It's fine for almanac kinds of information and fact, but its humanities articles are mostly terrible (not to mention terribly dull). But if you've ever been a Wikipedia contributor as a hobby, as I was for a while, you know the problems that arise when random contributors who've read some website somewhere decide they're just as qualified to shape an article as people who actually have degrees in and holistic knowledge of a topic. And I read that some of the most high-profile AI relies on Wikipedia, perhaps disproportionately.

5 Recommend

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Urbie4 commented April 17, 2023

U

Urbie4

RIApril 17, 2023

@C Wolfe I only rarely contribute to Wikipedia, because of all the self-appointed gatekeepers. Try to get something into an article, run into someone who's got a lot of time on his hands and nothing better to do than dismiss your contribution as "non-notable," and you're SOL. Life is too short for that. So I have my own web site, where I'm the one who decides what's notable and what isn't.

2 Recommend

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Wallaby commented April 17, 2023

W

Wallaby

CAApril 17, 2023

According to the article, the new Google Search engine would be "[a] system [that] would learn what users want to know based on what they’re searching when they begin using it. And it would offer lists of preselected options for objects to buy, information to research and other information." For a few users like me this is what we _don't_ want -- more personalized search. I'd rather have a more generic one where I have greater choice and not have a distant, omnipresent system filter in for me what I _might_ or _should_ want based on my search history and search patterns -- even if that system uses A.I. That's why in 2008, I switched to DuckDuckGo. I find its generic, often crowd-sourced results fine for my needs, and surprisingly spot-on, although for others YMMV. Everytime I would use Google, I would worry about my privacy. I still do, because DDG isn't perfect (c.f. the Microsoft controversy) but now I feel much more relaxed than during the few years that I used Google. I also gave up Chrome browser and now use Firefox and Brave browsers. But my work and school still make us use Gmail.

6 Recommend

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Patricia commented April 17, 2023

P

Patricia

TampaApril 17, 2023

Google works well for me; while I own stock in Microsoft and should be cheering on Bing, I just find it more loud than useful. Should be an entertaining race - and one that is built upon competition in the market - aka 'the American way.'

1 Recommend

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Timit commented April 17, 2023

T

Timit

WEApril 17, 2023

You used Google, then Google used you. It retained your voice prints for later use. It consolidated your interests, thoughts and finished your sentences, almost thinking for you. Google and Lexis Nexis, with countless others, know you well enough to pass judgement, to sell your story and predictive behavior to corporations. Like a whisper behind your back, you will never see what they sell as fact. Time for Congress to protect our information and privacy, using the European standards- Before "allowing" Artificial Intelligence to sweep over Us.

62 Recommend

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LM commented April 17, 2023

L

LM

New JerseyApril 17, 2023

Search engines are inherently biased, relational, and even unjust—unlike the objective organization of the Dewey decimal system. You have to be in the know before you can know. Worse, you have to buy space on the shelf, so to speak.

5 Recommend

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2 REPLIES

Concerned Citizen commented April 17, 2023

C

Concerned Citizen

USAApril 17, 2023

@LM The Dewey Decimal System was not "objectively organized," @LM. Recent research has revealed that Dewey's classifications bundled all works about African Americans and other Black cultures across the diaspora under two numbers--325, for slavery; and 326, for colonization. In the 1920s, Howard University's Librarian Dorothy Porter Wesley devised a more fine-tuned order that classified works by genre and author. She also lobbied against Dewey's system, promoting her revised scheme to organize Black materials to other libraries, which was eventually adopted as a new standard. As you say, @LM, "search engines are inherently biased, relational, and even unjust." The Dewey decimal system is no exception.

11 Recommend

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LM commented April 17, 2023

L

LM

New JerseyApril 17, 2023

@Concerned Citizen Fair enough—you sound informed and I appreciate what you’ve shared. The revised system is still based on shared assumptions and agreed upon organizational structure and not buying and selling for access.

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DL commented April 17, 2023

D

DL

Colorado Springs, COApril 17, 2023

I just want Boolean back

9 Recommend

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1 REPLY

Sigmund123 commented April 17, 2023

Sigmund123

Sigmund123

New YorkApril 17, 2023

@DL You can do Boolean in Google. Ask Bing and it will show you :-)

4 Recommend

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Kurt commented April 17, 2023

K

Kurt

SeattleApril 17, 2023

I, for one, am enjoying watching a slothful, bloated company squirm under some much-needed competition. It has gotten ridiculous how many ads (which need a hawk’s eye to distinguish from engine results) I need to scroll through. The funny bit is Google basically invented much of the technology that is attacking its moat. Good luck Google and change the CEO, Pichai is a don’t-rock-the-boat cruise control CEO. It is now, thankfully, wartime.

50 Recommend

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Johnny G commented April 17, 2023

J

Johnny G

IndianaApril 17, 2023

Keep this high tech product with America, our allies, and friend's. Do not share this with China or Russia. Ban the company from doing so in the interest of National interest and security.

4 Recommend

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2 REPLIES

George Machun commented April 17, 2023

G

George Machun

Cape TownApril 17, 2023

@Johnny G Too bad China is already way ahead of us on AI. We'll end up using Chinese AI, not the other way around.

1 Recommend

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Preson commented April 17, 2023

P

Preson

BrooklynApril 17, 2023

So much for free-market capitalism.

1 Recommend

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DT commented April 17, 2023

D

DT

Los Angeles , CAApril 17, 2023

I have opted out of Google search engine (deleted). It generates all kinds of undesirable advertisements and its search is mostly rubbish results.

8 Recommend

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Howard commented April 17, 2023

H

Howard

Palo AltoApril 17, 2023

Has Google considered replacing Sundar Pichai with Bard?

30 Recommend

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McFly commented April 17, 2023

M

McFly

NYCApril 17, 2023

So now they want to fix it? What a lazy company.

6 Recommend

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Scot commented April 17, 2023

S

Scot

NYCApril 17, 2023

Google search hasn’t worked well for end users as a search engine for a decade. Users bring questions to the site, and Google sells their identities and their questions to businesses without providing high-quality answers to the users. It’s unfortunate that it has taken this long, but as a user, I welcome some alternatives. Unfortunately, American antitrust law only keeps us laboring under a series of monopolists. As a for-profit venture, Microsoft doesn’t have the interests of the public at heart either, and American law is impotent.

32 Recommend

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1 REPLY

Bob commented April 17, 2023

B

Bob

North DakotaApril 17, 2023

@Scot "Google sells their identities" You may not like Google, but this is a false statement.

2 Recommend

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Graham Holmes commented April 17, 2023

G

Graham Holmes

RaleighApril 17, 2023

Security and privacy are always secondary to time to market for companies. Not hard to imagine then what will spill out of Pandora’s box when AI is rushed to market.

3 Recommend

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SDK1965 commented April 17, 2023

S

SDK1965

San Francisco, CAApril 17, 2023

It is just this kind of money driven decision (inherent in our capitalist system, I realize) that increases the likelihood of A.I. going south--with possible disastrous consequences for the human race. I went to college with a typewriter and graduated with a Macintosh personal computer. And for the the first 20 years of the internet/PC revolution, the sense of personal empowerment was truly on the scale of the printing press. But the gigantic worldwide experiment driven by Facebook and other tech giants making billions of dollars keeping users addicted to their screens (primarily by using algorithms that promote the most negative, hurtful and extreme viewpoints) has brought out the worst in human nature. The rush to make billions on A.I. is putting us on a similar path, the outcome of which could be far far worse. I appreciate that many people in the tech world understand the potential harms and the potential planet-saving benefits of A.I. But preventing decisions like this from driving us over a cliff will require political will and thoughtful regulation. And we wonder why our kids are so anxious and so many adults are seeking professional help to cope.

30 Recommend

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Layla commented April 17, 2023

Layla

Layla

TexasApril 17, 2023

DuckDuckGo is the way to go—no collecting, sharing, selling or storing of personal information! I dumped Google long ago.

81 Recommend

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3 REPLIES

ku commented April 17, 2023

K

ku

onlineApril 17, 2023

@Layla Brave browser is great, too.

2 Recommend

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Christatos commented April 17, 2023

C

Christatos

US of AApril 17, 2023

And all the ad supported search results you want.

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Patrick commented April 17, 2023

P

Patrick

SFApril 17, 2023

that name though

2 Recommend

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One More Time commented April 17, 2023

One More Time

One More Time

Georgia, USAApril 17, 2023

Every get the feeling companies are so sure of themselves they suddenly just throw new things at us, like force us to accept what they think is great.....like AI chat platforms. They bette be careful as it may turn people off. We're entering an area where personal freedom is being diminished. The world is getting smaller and smaller.

4 Recommend

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Jeff commented April 17, 2023

J

Jeff

Ann Arbor, Mich.April 17, 2023

Many corporations either fail or struggle because of their fascination with short-term financial considerations at the expense of their long-term success. Execs come in and make sweeping changes -- cost cutting, layoffs, reorgs, etc. -- with their arms flailing wildly to demonstrate all of the "impact" they're having. And then they move on to the next team, or the next company, leaving a mess in their wake. Google seems to be falling into this same trap. If they want to maintain its dominance, they had better start focusing more on the long-term consequences of their decisions.

21 Recommend

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1 REPLY

Jim K commented April 17, 2023

J

Jim K

San JoseApril 17, 2023

@Jeff You are exactly right. I have worked in tech for almost four decades, and every once-great company that I stayed at for more than five or six years was eventually ruined by poorly managed growth, usually by bad hiring decisions into the ranks of management.

1 Recommend

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Catherine commented April 17, 2023

C

Catherine

NYCApril 17, 2023

How “personalized” do my search results need to be? Will it tell display ivermectin ads when I look up Covid symptoms? This feels like a race to make sure we all live in increasingly self-feeding bias bubbles, already a huge problem. Would love to hear more about how that issue will be addressed.

118 Recommend

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2 REPLIES

Found Nuance commented April 17, 2023

F

Found Nuance

DC-ishApril 17, 2023

Yes! I remember (and sometimes miss) when you could tell someone to search for a term and X would be the third (or whatever) result that came up. When we all saw much more similar forms of the world. This fragmentation will not bring us back together.

7 Recommend

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me commented April 17, 2023

M

me

midwestApril 17, 2023

Don't see privacy issues mentioned once in this article. I guess that ship has sailed, huh? I breathlessly await the next "innovation" that forces me to look at and/or buy ads more efficiently and for more $s. This is what we have half best brains in the world doing. And the other half working to find loopholes in financial regulations so computers can turn pennies into billions. What a world sigh. The more things change the more they stay the same.

2 Recommend

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R.A. American Abroad commented April 17, 2023

R

R.A. American Abroad

Barcelona, SpainApril 17, 2023

After years of incrementally making the search results worse by creating an entire ecosystem dedicated to search engine optimization and sponsored results, is it any wonder that Google is now running scared for the first time in, well, ever? How embarrassing for Google -- extremely profitable and sitting on huge cash reserves -- after laying off tens of thousands just weeks before OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public. Will they do an about-face and start hiring again, I wonder? Finally, after years of churning out new products only to retire them after a short time, can anyone trust these new features will be around in six months' time? Will they even be useful, or will they just be used to deliver ads to users in 'new and innovative' ways?

112 Recommend

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1 REPLY

Found Nuance commented April 17, 2023

F

Found Nuance

DC-ishApril 17, 2023

I think your last line is exactly right. Ads are the core business of Meta and Google. Remember that as you use their “services”. Google has had many useful and quirky ideas/products/services over the years. I was surprised at just how many when I stumbled on a list of all of them. Many seem to have been pet projects and when that person left the company, it ended. It does not inspire confidence in anything being around a long time.

10 Recommend

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Mark commented April 17, 2023

M

Mark

BrooklynApril 17, 2023

Google search has become increasingly unreliable and almost unusable through the years due to both the rise of unmitigated SEO techniques and Google's own prioritization of ads and redirection into revenue (providing links to their own info boxes on restaurants rather than restaurant direct links for example). Google originally rose to dominance because it provided a service that cut through all that noise. It is now the thing it was developed to disrupt.

219 Recommend

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8 REPLIES

T. Rivers commented April 17, 2023

T

T. Rivers

Missoula, MTApril 17, 2023

@Mark Well said. Google is the new Yahoo. Useful and amazing in its day, but now quaint and archaic. It’s an ouroboros, consuming its own utility with the insatiable need to serve more and more ads. When the truth is for sale, credibility goes out the window. Maybe they should rehire Marissa so she can totally drive it into the ground.

57 Recommend

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SDK1965 commented April 17, 2023

S

SDK1965

San Francisco, CAApril 17, 2023

@Mark: Very good point. As frustrating as many Google searches have become, I have found Bing to be even worse.

7 Recommend

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Robert commented April 17, 2023

R

Robert

Long IslandApril 17, 2023

@T. Rivers FYI, Yahoo! Search has been powered by Microsoft's Bing search engine for years.

2 Recommend

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Michael Ash commented April 17, 2023

M

Michael Ash

Amherst, Mass.April 17, 2023

“Cadillac to increase size of tailfins.” The New York Times appears to have printed an Alphabet/Google press release about some trivial improvements to a model that is fundamentally broken and bad for the public Privacy degradation, advertising saturation, and internet addiction are to the Internet giants what fuel inefficiency, smog, neglect of safety, and planned obsolescence have been to the auto industry, especially the Big Three in their heyday.

3 Recommend

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Marv Eisen commented April 17, 2023

M

Marv Eisen

NYApril 17, 2023

You’ve encapsulated it perfectly. This says it all.

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Midwest Confidential commented April 17, 2023

M

Midwest Confidential

OmahaApril 17, 2023

Is there an extension somewhere that just skips the first page of results. An imperfect solution, maybe, but that’s pretty much what I do manually if I have to use Google.

2 Recommend

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PhDJDoug commented April 17, 2023

P

PhDJDoug

Cincinnati, OhioApril 17, 2023

@Midwest Confidential But then I find Google just tends to repeat the initial results further down the list. Argh!

2 Recommend

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ejb commented April 17, 2023

ejb

ejb

PA 1st Congressional DistrictApril 17, 2023

@PhDJDoug That just this minute happened to me, and I was wondering if anyone else was noticing the peculiar smell.

1 Recommend

TECHNOLOGY

The Tragedy of Google Search

With a landmark antitrust trial under way, a giant of the modern web is buckling under its own weight.

By Charlie Warzel

A shattered magnifying glass

What is Google Search in 2023? A site that started 25 years ago as a list of blue links has mutated beyond recognition. Today, Google isn’t just an index to help sort through the endless libraries of online information—it’s a reference guide for the physical world too, having mapped most corners of the Earth and cataloged its contents. It is part encyclopedia and part predictive engine, guessing what you might be typing or thinking, serving information based on what others before you typed. It is Moviefone and the stock ticker, a well-trained chatbot, an image repository, a shopping mall.

It is also, like the modern web, creaking under the weight of its enormous size and an infinitely renewable supply of content, both human- and AI-generated. Unlike its streamlined, efficient former self, Google Search is now bloated and overmonetized. It’s harder now to find answers that feel authoritative or uncompromised; a search for healthy toddler snacks is overloaded with sponsored product placement, prompts to engage with “more questions” (How do you fill a hungry toddler? “Meat and Seafood. Bring on the meat!”), and endless, keyword-engorged content. Using Google once felt like magic, and now it’s more like rifling through junk mail, dodging scams and generic mailers.

It’s fitting, then, that as the shine has worn off, Google has also found itself in an unusual moment of vulnerability. The company is on trial and scrambling internally to maintain relevance in the generative-AI era. Over the next several weeks, the Justice Department and a group of states will argue that the company violated antitrust laws by striking deals to protect its monopoly position in the online-search business. It all feels less like a midlife crisis than an existential one.

At the heart of the case against Google is a simple question: Does the company command 90 percent of the U.S. search-engine market because its technology is superior and users genuinely prefer it, or because it paid massive sums to companies like Apple to be used as a default service over competitors such as Bing? In its opening days, the trial has hinged on arguments about the importance of data. The DOJ has argued that having access to user data such as web history and past searches (the kind that are easier to collect when you’re the default browser on millions of phones) is like “oxygen for a search engine”; Google plans to argue that, although user data can improve search quality, “there are diminishing returns to scale.”

That defense is ridiculous. Scale means everything to Silicon Valley and the venture-capital firms that fuel its start-ups—including Google, in its early years. The laws of network effects state that users beget more users, that those users shed data that are helpful in personalizing and streamlining the user experience. Google thrives because it indexes unfathomable amounts of information across the web and processes several billion queries a day—queries that are aided in part by what the company describes as “aggregated and anonymized interaction data” from its users.

Read: The open secret of Google Search

The company has long bragged about the scope of its work. “There isn’t anything that has operated at our scale before,” Bill Coughran, Google’s then–senior vice president of engineering, told Forbes in 2011. Google’s mission statement—to “organize the world’s information”—is a project that is defined by scale, one that requires the company to wrap its arms around an ever-evolving internet, process that information, and return the relevant bits to an infinite queue of hungry searchers. To suggest that there are “diminishing returns to scale” is to deny the very model that makes Google Search effective. Internal Google emails submitted as evidence by the DOJ attempt to show that the company’s engineers and executives know this. One email shows Udi Manber, a senior engineer, directly contradicting the argument. “It’s absolutely not true that scale is not important,” Manber wrote. “We make very good use of everything we get.”

And yet, Google’s lawyers might be right about the diminishing returns of its size—just not in the way they intended. In recent years, ex-Googlers have written lengthy blog posts saying that the company has lost its way and is coasting on its own success, which has made it “conservative,” “arrogant,” and lacking a mission and a sense of urgency. Noam Bardin, the longtime CEO of Waze, which was acquired by Google in 2013, has lamented having to navigate Google’s stifling, labyrinthian corporate bureaucracy.

Google’s stagnation has trickled down to its products. Search has grown bloated with advertisements and widgets that prioritize its own services, such as Shopping, Finance, and Maps, over organic results. Although the company constantly updates and tweaks its algorithms, which are powered by natural-language-processing AI tools, there is a creeping sense—among frustrated programmers, searchers, and even journalists—that the site is no longer as useful or intuitive as it once was. One reason for this feeling may be that Google’s algorithms have been successfully gamed by low-quality websites and search-engine-optimization companies that help their clickbaity clients show up in the first page of Google Search results. An SEO expert named Marie Haynes suggested to me last year that Google’s algorithms are getting better but that the website is going through a transitional period—the engine is still working out the kinks. In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for Google said, in part, “We make thousands of quality improvements every year to ensure we’re delivering the most helpful results, and we’ve developed entirely new ways to search, which is why people around the world continue to use and love Search.”

Still, there are indicators that the product might continue to struggle to deliver high-quality search results on an internet soon to be flooded with AI-generated photos, videos, and text. Just this week, 404 Media reported that the top Google result on a search for the Tiananmen Square “tank man” was, for a period of time, an AI-generated image of the man taking a selfie. Last fall, the former Googler and ex–Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer offered a charitable explanation as to why Google Search feels worse, arguing that the search engine is merely a reflection of the internet as a whole, which has become more complex and laden with fraudsters and garbage. The explanation lets Google off the hook a bit: The company’s chief purpose is to navigate the sprawling morass of information, after all. Ultimately, it’s a tacit admission that Google has tried and failed to tame the web.

Read: How Google ran out of ideas

Search’s devolution is a familiar story in an economy that demands untenable growth. The trajectory always looks like this: Invent a world-changing technology, scale it up, monetize it, print money, and take it public. Then, of course, there is the pressure to expand even more to appease investors. In Google’s case, organizing the world’s information meant conquering the web, books, images, inboxes, and geography. But with every success, there is more pressure to scale further, this time into moon-shot territory — self-driving cars and even a project to “cure death.” It becomes easier to acquire companies with the war chest than to build products from scratch, and to ink exclusivity deals in order to keep competitors at bay.

Google Search is arguably the most important innovation of the commercial internet—a modern marvel that has forever changed how billions of people access information. Its success, especially early on, felt like a small miracle. But Google Search is also a tragedy: The democratization of information demanded the invention of a behemoth that could successfully handle the abundance of the web. But chasing scale is a dangerous, unwinnable game. Perhaps the real lesson of Google’s story is that you can try to iterate, but ultimately, no company or product can grow alongside the internet forever without, eventually, being swallowed up.

Charlie Warzel is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Galaxy Brain, about technology, media, and big ideas. He can be reached via email.