Google's AI Integration: Enhancing Search for Over 1 Billion Users

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0:37Today, they had their big Google I.O. conference. They announced all of the ways they're incorporating AI into all of their platforms and tools. And it looks like Google is doing a massive play to try to really incorporate AI into everything they're doing. Now, I will also say that in the past, Google has already been doing a lot of different AI things in their tools. So today they really took it to the next level and started announcing the big changes that they're making. And one of the biggest areas that people are excited to hear about was actually in search, because search is one of the biggest tools Google has.

1:10It's the biggest revenue stream where they're making billions of dollars. It's the reason they are a billion dollar company. So on the podcast, we are going to dive into that, what the implications are, and what all of these changes are going to be. So right off the bat, Google is implementing a new AI feature to the top of search results, similar to something that Bing or ChatGPT is doing, or BARD for people that have tested that out, where essentially now this is going to be incorporated directly into Google search. billions of people use Google search this is actually a very massive thing that Google is doing by incorporating this and essentially when you do a Google search there's going to be originally all of the obviously Google instantly loads all the search results like normal there will be a bar or a box at the top of the screen that says AI is you know that they're just testing this out at the moment and after a second it loads and it generates essentially what you'd get out of chat GPT if you asked it the same type of question now the results are slightly different because Google does have underlying callouts to web pages where it's sourcing the information from and well a lot of people are saying this is super cool I will also mention that as far as being revolutionary it's essentially the same product you get with Bing chat right or that has chat GPT for where it has they currently do callouts or annotations so it's sourcing the the data and where it's pulling it from and you can click on those links to go to those websites and also the it's kind of interesting though like compared to Google to Bing and whatnot I was recently just playing with Bing and like they kind of have like a search and a chat tab that you can toggle between Google it's gonna be different because this is right in the search tab you do the search it shows at the top now I will say this isn't the first search engine to do this brave has their own search engine for those that don't know brave is uh i guess a competitor to google um chrome where it's a web browser um and it's kind of like a privacy focused web browser it's one i use and while i do use the uh browser of brave i don't use their search engine much except sometimes when i you know have a new phone that i set up before i go and switch it um to google or to duck duck go or something else.

3:24It's, you know, it's kind of set as the default on that search engine or on that browser. So in any case, I did notice before recently switching that Brave does the same thing. They've been doing this for a number of months. I think they just got an API to GPT 3.5 or probably to four if they got early access to that. So, you know, this isn't something exactly revolutionary. That being said, this is obviously pretty big in a sense that these other search engines are pretty small compared to Google, who has over 90 % of the search market at the moment. I believe that Google currently has around 93%, if I'm correct, and Microsoft has around 3 % of kind of the global search market.

4:08So these are obviously pretty massive differences. So when Google makes the change, it's a bigger deal because this is just impacting so many more people. But you know, that being said, I would hate to give Google too much credit for being innovative. Although, you know, big companies don't have to be innovative nowadays, I guess, look at Apple, who creates the same iPhone every year, it would seem. So anyways, that's another topic. But other things that Google is currently doing right now with their search, to try to make this a powerful tool is a sense that, you know, they have this kind of AI feature at the top, but it doesn't mean that they're always going to be showing it.

4:44And so they have an algorithm or I guess AI now, I'm just assuming we're going to change the word algorithm to AI nowadays. It seems like AI is the new trendy word. Instead of saying, you know, they have like a coded algorithm to do something, they just trained an AI to get you your results or decide what you want. That's my prediction of the future of that word. But in any case, they have an algorithm or AI that decides whether a result is going to be better with an AI summary or if it is going to be better with just Google's regular results. And I think looking at the stock market right now, we're seeing that Google's shares are rallying as investors are happy that Google's not getting rid of advertising altogether.

5:25There's still a pretty strong case for Google ads. The problem and the worry with a lot of people is if they exclusively replace their search results with an AI response like ChatGPT or something, that it would cannibalize their ad business, which is what made them a trillion dollar company and is making them, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. So that's not going away. And in fact, it's still, I think, definitely always going to be there, those results, and it's the AI that will come in and out depending on what you're searching for and how relevant they view that to be. Now, that being said, when testing this AI, it's definitely still has a lot of the same problems as chat GPT.

6:04And I think this is one of the negatives I would say in Google's court right now is the fact that they said they were going they were slow walking this AI because they wanted to be more safe and thoughtful than chat GPT that rolled it out super fast. And it has issues, you know, hallucinates and it makes up false information and stuff like that. Unfortunately, it would appear based off of current searches with Bard and also their last big announcement that dropped a hundred billion dollars from their market cap when barred said some false information it would appear that they haven't solved the problem and it doing math is something that struggles with now that being said google did recently announce a new um llm model a new i guess way that they're going to be training these and apparently that is supposed to be better it's called palm 2 and apparently supposed to be better with math and some other areas so i guess that's left to be said of whether that really is going to be better to fix some of these problems.

7:04But I would say it's far from perfect at the moment. And so they definitely have not cracked the AI lie problem that you know, people are talking about. Something that is interesting, just from a design perspective is that this whole AI section that does appear at the top, it is colored. So it kind of has like a purple or like a different colored background. So it's, it's like easy to recognize the difference between that and the regular results. And something I will also mention is the fact that while they're not killing the regular results on mobile, when this this AI section appears, it really does take up the whole screen.

7:39So it's it, you know, may not be killing all the links, but it definitely is pushing them way down the page. And this is going to be the big thing. I would be very curious to see what happens to websites search traffic over the next six or over the next month as they roll this out and to see how consumers shift their behavior. Now, the one other thing I will say, though, in regards to that on why it may not be as big of a deal, maybe it will be. But the thing is, Google has been doing something very similar to this with featured snippets at the top of their search results, where essentially they're just taking a snippet out of a web page.

8:13And instead of making you click on the web page, you see at the top, this is like really similar. That got a lot of criticism. But what I would say is for featured snippets, I think that probably appeared maybe one out of 10 searches, maybe really popular searches, not on obscure things, this is going to probably be a lot more frequent. And it's going to be a lot more in depth, right? Because with featured snippets, they were working with, they had to try to pull a snippet that perfectly answered your question out of a web page. And now they can really customize the response based off of three web pages.

8:46So I think it's going to be more likely that we're going to see these at the top of most all searches. And so I do believe that web traffic is going to go down for consumers as people can just start to read these, which is obviously going to hurt people that have an advertising model that are reliant on that. But another interesting thing is how Google is treating products in this whole search thing. So Google actually has, you know, if you say I would like to get a Bluetooth speaker for a pool party, you know, what's the best one, it will actually come up with a list of criteria, like x, y, and z, you want it to have good battery, you want to be water resistant, you want it to blah, blah, blah, like they'll have their little blurb.

9:25And then below, they will actually feature four products, they'll be like, it's the JBL flip six, there's the, you know, UE mega boom, there's the Bose sound link that and they have like, it's pretty much they're pulling from Google shopping. So what's really interesting is Google is kind of at this place where they have all the data. They have so much data on the internet, but with Google shopping, with Google Maps, they have so much data, they, you know, like Google Maps knows when every single store and company in the world opens and closes, it knows their hours, knows what days they're closed.

9:56And so really, for them, the problem is just trying to figure out how to like how to pull all this data in together and consolidate it and to be able to feed it out. And I think that they actually have the data to make a more powerful result than open AI. But I think it's left to be said, when they'll be able to pull that off, and it doesn't appear to be in a super timely manner. So that is something that they're currently working on, though. That's something that people over at Google in their big announcement today, we're talking about, you know, how they go about this process. And they, obviously, they're trying to go full in on AI to stay up with what consumers are looking for and not to get left behind by chat gpt but that being said of you know the dozens of new ai features they announced today uh there is only a handful that are actually live and the rest they say are coming in the coming months so it's kind of like uh google at the beginning of the year bought time by saying okay we're gonna make all the big ai announcements at um you know google io in a few months and then now that the announcements or the announcement time has come they'll say okay these things will be rolling out in a few months so i feel like they definitely are not the fastest at pulling this stuff out and I think the idea is that they're being more thoughtful about it but I really think it's going to be left to said if they're being more thoughtful or if they're just being slow and going to get left behind by a lot of these companies that are front-running some of these really similar tools.

11:21So something that a lot of people brought up is the fact that all it takes is Google losing 1 % market share on their you know, their search monopoly, and that's worth two billion, every percent is worth about two billion dollars. And so, you know, recently an article came out that said Microsoft in a couple months ago saw a six percent increase, or Bing saw a six percent increase in search traffic, and in February, and Google saw a one percent decline in search traffic. So that one percent decline, right, I guess if that was over the course of 12 months, it would be worth$2 billion. And if that, you know, increases, it really is not a good, is really not a good omen for Google, for Google and kind of where this whole thing with AI and search is going in general.

12:11And to be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing declines in search results from Google and Microsoft and Bing just based off the fact that so many people are going to be searching and are currently searching for responses on chat gpt there's some things that i just know it will respond better and it's just my go-to i don't bother with google other times when i need to do some quick research on a handful of things um i i go with google so there's kind of the back and forth but if google doesn't keep up and it lets open ai incorporate a lot of different features and the plugins they're currently doing i think they could be in big trouble but i think at the moment they're not you know they're not completely dead in the water um as of yet so i think it's when you're going to to be really important to kind of follow along with what's happening with Google as it's going it's one of the biggest internet companies obviously as we said before they're not killing the ads in uh in like the in the snapshots but they're still experimenting and they don't really know exactly how those ads are going to work so you know they have regular ads that can appear above the snapshot they have different things but um they haven't actually figured out exactly how they're going to be incorporating ads into those AI written snapshots themselves.

13:23And I think that it's kind of like, it's kind of like one of those dirty things where no one wants to be the first to do it. Bing isn't doing it. Brave isn't doing it. Google doesn't want to be the first one to just say like, hey, come get our like AI chat that's sponsored. It really feels like it undermines the integrity of the chat response. If it's, you know, like here's an AI response, but it has sponsored links in it therefore it's like jeopardized and biased towards those sponsored results and you don't know how much you can trust it so it honestly i think that is going to be one of their biggest issues and balances are going to have to strike is figuring out how to incorporate ads into those snapshots without jeopardizing the trust of the content because if i can get two responses one that is uh has nothing sponsored and one that is a sponsored result and then i'm obviously going to trust the one with nothing sponsored because i know they didn't pay to you know get included into that result.

14:15Now, that being said, I have heard some really interesting theories floated recently where people were saying that they could sponsor, like essentially they could push people to search for specific prompts in these search engines that they already know speak favorably about them. So for example, if Bose speakers knew that if you search for best sound cancelling headphones, if they knew that like when the AI wrote that response, Bose headphones were like ranked as number one in that response, it would totally be Bose's, it would be to Bose's advantage to make sure you use a prompt phrased in a certain way.

14:56So some people are even speculating that you could sponsor certain prompts or like auto-suggestion. So as you're typing a prompt out and it auto suggests what to fill it, you could like sponsor the an auto fill that you know, is going to put your company in a good light versus a different way that you might phrase that same prompt and it might recommend a different company. So really interesting theories people have right now around how exactly this is going to pan out. And I've heard there's one other concept I want to bring up. And that is kind of the difference between as far as these AIs, and them being factual and fluid.

15:32So right now you can build a system that is factual. And I think that might be what Google is going more for. And that pretty much just means, you know, it has a lot of straight up information. But then you can also build a system that's more fluid, you know, it feels more seamless and human. And I think that might be what chat GPT is going for in a way. However, of course, it has all of its, you know, disclaimer saying this is a, you know, this is not a human this is an ai model i can't have opinions on x y and z and you know it always has those kind of boilerplate responses but i think um fundamentally google might be trying to go for a little bit more of a factual thing it doesn't appear to have any personality um um that being said though there was recently a reporter on the verge that got early access to this new google search tool um and she asked it for some information about adele and when it kind of it came up with her response and i believe during this by the way i think she had like a google person with her like helping her do the searches i think google's really um google's really close source and worried about this i i think they're building a lot of this stuff from like a protective stance they're already one of the biggest companies in the world they're making tons of money they just don't want to lose their market share and lose um so it's kind of interesting the the framing i feel like of google coming up these products but anyways in this case uh this reporter searched for Adele and it said you know here's some basic information about Adele blah blah just stuff you'd expect to see and then it said it said at the bottom like Adele's um you know her concert recordings are way better than her or her live recordings are way better than her other recordings and the google researcher that was you know showing this to the reporter was like you know it's not actually supposed to say that it's kind of like a glitch or whatever it's not supposed to have an opinion and say something like that it's not supposed to use the word I like it's supposed to just be a chatbot and I think it's really interesting like we have all these models and they are tempted to speak a certain like they like at their base they speak a certain way and I feel like all these researchers and companies developing them are suppressing them and changing it so it's like you know it has boilerplate responses I can't respond I can't have an opinion I can't respond to this or that And it's just really interesting that by default, these things are not like just this neutral technology saying a specific of like a flat out response.

17:52They do have a lot of people's opinions because this is what they were trained on. So it's really interesting to see what Google will do. That came out in a recent test of this like product. So that's obviously baked into the product that, you know, glitches, they would say, will continue to happen. um so it'll be interesting to see what other opinions uh google will have there's a lot of different ways people are training ai models i recently did a podcast about anthropic and how they're using a constitutional ai approach if you don't know what that is highly recommend looking at it as it's i believe a fundamentally different way and more transparent way of training ai models um so it'll be interesting to see if google ends up adapting something like that or if they're continuing with kind of the big wide open net that it would appear open AI is using.

18:37So it'll be interesting to see how this continues to evolve for Google and the world. But this is definitely big news as we are now about to enter a phase where one over a billion people are going to be searching with Google and are going to be seeing AI results every single day.