Even If You Hate AI, You Will Use Google AI Search
It's been 17 years since I sat in on the iconic weekly search quality meeting in the Ouagadougou conference room at Google’s Mountain View campus. That Thursday morning, around three dozen engineers, product managers, and executives sat at a table or sprawled on the floor to discuss why certain search queries or categories didn’t yield a perfect result and to suggest fixes. In 2010 those meetings led Google to make 550 changes to its search algorithm, a number that seemed impressive at the time.
That memory seems like a tintype. At Google’s I/O developerconferencethis week, a keynote speaker—head of search Liz Reid—officially down-ranked good old-fashioned search to virtual oblivion. This was a continuation of a process that began two years ago, when Google introduced “AI Overview,” its summaries that sit at the top of its search results page and literally lurk over the famous “10 blue links.” By...
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