AI Is Breaking Google
Better Offline
Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 688 Ratings
🗓️ 29 May 2024
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On May 14th 2024, Google introduced their Search Generative Experience, a service that uses hallucination-prone artificial intelligence to generate answers to queries rather than just presenting links, all so that they could Wall Street that they're innovative and future-forward. The result is an even-more-broken search experience, and in this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through the rotten state of Google, and speaks with Lily Ray, a 15-year veteran of the search engine optimization industry, about how Google abandoned the web.
LINKS:
Lily Ray: https://lilyray.nyc/ https://twitter.com/lilyraynyc
The Verge's Interview With Sundar Pichai: https://www.theverge.com/24158374/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-ai-search-gemini-future-of-the-internet-web-openai-decoder-interview
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an IHeart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed Human |
| 0:03.5 | Quarzo Media |
| 0:07.9 | Hello and welcome to Better Offline. |
| 0:11.4 | I'm your host, Ed Zittron. |
| 0:23.6 | Better Offline. Hey. What's all the line? Hey, you ever wonder who ruined Google? |
| 0:26.6 | Well, the answer is Prabagar Ragavan, Google's former head of ads, who led a coup to run Google search, which led to websites decay. |
| 0:34.6 | Now, I'm not just recounting my own work here. My source is Google search. |
| 0:40.3 | No, really, really. Search who ruined Google on Google search, and it will pop up with an AI-generated |
| 0:46.0 | summary of multiple articles that cite a piece I wrote called The Man Who Killed Google Search. |
| 0:51.3 | Why? Because on May 14, 2024, Google decided in their incredible wisdom |
| 0:56.7 | to add generative artificial intelligence to search results. These new AI generate results, |
| 1:02.6 | dubbed Google's search generative experience, replace the initial links you'll see on some pages |
| 1:07.6 | with an AI overview, one generated by scraping the text of other websites |
| 1:13.0 | so that Google can answer your questions without you having to visit them, and consequently |
| 1:17.9 | give them any ad revenue. |
| 1:19.9 | It's very strange, but also, you may be thinking, isn't generative AI the thing that |
| 1:25.8 | regularly gets things wrong and is kind of unreliable |
| 1:29.0 | and everyone knows about that? Google wouldn't do that, right? Wrong! McKinsey alumnus and Google |
| 1:35.6 | CEO Sundar Peshai told the Verges Nila Patel that he believes these results will actually help |
| 1:41.1 | the web. I'd argue otherwise, these generative results will only help |
| 1:45.0 | centralize the web's information around these big publishers that Google likes, all while creating |
... |
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