Google’s broken link to the web

If AI chatbots and AI-powered search results are summarizing everything for you, why would you go to a website? And if we all stop going to websites, what’s the incentive to put new content on the web? What’s going to stop shady characters from flooding the web with AI-generated spam to try and game these systems? And if we succeed in choking the w... See more

There is simply no path forward for a news outlet of any meaningful size trying to support itself on social and search traffic. So what will be the A.I. platform publishing strategy? Well, I’m going to make a couple predictions and we’ll see how I do:

1. The conversational A.I. search results will get better and quickly make the human-generated results

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The search experience on the internet is dying. Google is no longer trying to organize the world’s information. It’s just scraping it, stealing it, and serving an AI generated mashup of everything it steals from human creators in an effort to keep people on the first page of search results, because that’s where their ads are and where they make the

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The web creates new challenges for information retrieval. The amount of information on the web is  growing rapidly, as well as the number of new users inexperienced in the art of web research. People are  likely to surf the web using its link graph, often starting with high quality human maintained indices  such as Yahoo! or with sea... See more

Does this have to be a bad thing, though? If the web as we know it changes in the face of artificial abundance? Some will say it’s just the way of the world, noting that the web itself killed what came before it, and often for the better. Printed encyclopedias are all but extinct, for example, but I prefer the breadth and accessibility of Wikipedia... See more

Everything that Google has done to make people stay on the page and make results more accessible has resulted in a set of editorial decisions that mean we’re no longer getting straight search results that take us away from the page, but are in some kind of Upside Down Google Funhouse Internet where the content is brought directly to us, and the int... See more