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Google’s AI Overviews misunderstand why people use Google

robot hand holding glue bottle over a pizza and tomatoes

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

Last month, we looked into some of the most incorrect, dangerous, and downright weird answers generated by Google’s new AI Overviews feature. Since then, Google has offered a partial apology/explanation for generating those kinds of results and has reportedly rolled back the feature’s rollout for at least some types of queries.

But the more I’ve thought about that rollout, the more I’ve begun to question the wisdom of Google’s AI-powered search results in the first place. Even when the system doesn’t give obviously wrong results, condensing search results into a neat, compact, AI-generated summary seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of how people use Google in the first place.

Reliability and relevance

When people type a question into the Google search bar, they only sometimes want the kind of basic reference information that can be found on a Wikipedia page or corporate website (or even a Google information snippet). Often, they’re looking for subjective information where there is no one “right” answer: “What are the best Mexican restaurants in Santa Fe?” or “What should I do with my kids on a rainy day?” or “How can I prevent cheese from sliding off my pizza?”

The value of Google has always been in pointing you to the places it thinks are likely to have good answers to those questions. But it’s still up to you, as a user, to figure out which of those sources is the most reliable and relevant to what you need at that moment.

  • This wasn’t funny when the guys at Pep Boys said it, either. (via)

    Kyle Orland / Google

  • Weird Al recommends “running with scissors” as well! (via)

    Kyle Orland / Google

  • This list of steps actually comes from a forum thread response about doing something completely different. (via)

    Kyle Orland / Google

  • An island that’s part of the mainland? (via)

    Kyle Orland / Google

  • If everything’s cheaper now, why does everything seem so expensive?

    Kyle Orland / Google

  • Pretty sure this Truman was never president… (via)

    Kyle Orland / Google

For reliability, any savvy Internet user makes use of countless context clues when judging a random Internet search result. Do you recognize the outlet or the author? Is the information from someone with seeming expertise/professional experience or a random forum poster? Is the site well-designed? Has it been around for a while? Does it cite other sources that you trust, etc.?

But Google also doesn’t know ahead of time which specific result will fit the kind of information you’re looking for. When it comes to restaurants in Santa Fe, for instance, are you in the mood for an authoritative list from a respected newspaper critic or for more off-the-wall suggestions from random locals? Or maybe you scroll down a bit and stumble on a loosely related story about the history of Mexican culinary influences in the city.

One of the unseen strengths of Google’s search algorithm is that the user gets to decide which results are the best for them. As long as there’s something reliable and relevant in those first few pages of results, it doesn’t matter if the other links are “wrong” for that particular search or user.

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Bing outage shows just how little competition Google search really has

Searching for new search —

Opinion: Actively searching without Google or Bing is harder than it looks.

Google logo on a phone in front of a Bing logo in the background

Getty Images

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine platform, went down in the very early morning today. That meant that searches from Microsoft’s Edge browsers that had yet to change their default providers didn’t work. It also meant that services relying on Bing’s search API—Microsoft’s own Copilot, ChatGPT search, Yahoo, Ecosia, and DuckDuckGo—similarly failed.

Services were largely restored by the morning Eastern work hours, but the timing feels apt, concerning, or some combination of the two. Google, the consistently dominating search platform, just last week announced and debuted AI Overviews as a default addition to all searches. If you don’t want an AI response but still want to use Google, you can hunt down the new “Web” option in a menu, or you can, per Ernie Smith, tack “&udm=14” onto your search or use Smith’s own “Konami code” shortcut page.

If dismay about AI’s hallucinations, power draw, or pizza recipes concern you—along with perhaps broader Google issues involving privacy, tracking, news, SEO, or monopoly power—most of your other major options were brought down by a single API outage this morning. Moving past that kind of single point of vulnerability will take some work, both by the industry and by you, the person wondering if there’s a real alternative.

Search engine market share, as measured by StatCounter, April 2023–April 2024.

Search engine market share, as measured by StatCounter, April 2023–April 2024.

StatCounter

Upward of a billion dollars a year

The overwhelming majority of search tools offering an “alternative” to Google are using Google, Bing, or Yandex, the three major search engines that maintain massive global indexes. Yandex, being based in Russia, is a non-starter for many people around the world at the moment. Bing offers its services widely, most notably to DuckDuckGo, but its ad-based revenue model and privacy particulars have caused some friction there in the past. Before his company was able to block more of Microsoft’s own tracking scripts, DuckDuckGo CEO and founder Gabriel Weinberg explained in a Reddit reply why firms like his weren’t going the full DIY route:

… [W]e source most of our traditional links and images privately from Bing … Really only two companies (Google and Microsoft) have a high-quality global web link index (because I believe it costs upwards of a billion dollars a year to do), and so literally every other global search engine needs to bootstrap with one or both of them to provide a mainstream search product. The same is true for maps btw — only the biggest companies can similarly afford to put satellites up and send ground cars to take streetview pictures of every neighborhood.

Bing makes Microsoft money, if not quite profit yet. It’s in Microsoft’s interest to keep its search index stocked and API open, even if its focus is almost entirely on its own AI chatbot version of Bing. Yet if Microsoft decided to pull API access, or it became unreliable, Google’s default position gets even stronger. What would non-conformists have to choose from then?

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Yelp: It’s gotten worse since Google made changes to comply with EU rules

illustration of google and yelp logos

Anjali Nair; Getty Images

To comply with looming rules that ban tech giants from favoring their own services, Google has been testing new look search results for flights, trains, hotels, restaurants, and products in Europe. The EU’s Digital Markets Act is supposed to help smaller companies get more traffic from Google, but reviews service Yelp says that when it tested Google’s design tweaks with consumers it had the opposite effect—making people less likely to click through to Yelp or another Google competitor.

The results, which Yelp shared with European regulators in December and WIRED this month, put some numerical backing behind complaints from Google rivals in travel, shopping, and hospitality that its efforts to comply with the DMA are insufficient—and potentially more harmful than the status quo. Yelp and thousands of others have been demanding that the EU hold a firm line against the giant companies including Apple and Amazon that are subject to what’s widely considered the world’s strictest antitrust law, violations of which can draw fines of up to 10 percent of global annual sales.

“All the gatekeepers are trying to hold on as long as possible to the status quo and make the new world unattractive,” says Richard Stables, CEO of shopping comparison site Kelkoo, which is unhappy with how Google has tweaked shopping results to comply with the DMA. “That’s really the game plan.”

Google spokesperson Rory O’Donoghue says the more than 20 changes made to search in response to the DMA are providing more opportunities for services such as Yelp to show up in results. “To suggest otherwise is plain wrong,” he says. Overall, Google’s tests of various DMA-inspired designs show clicks to review and comparison websites are up, O’Donoghue says—at the cost of users losing shortcuts to Google tools and individual businesses like airlines and restaurants facing a drop in visits from Google search. “We’ve been seeking feedback from a range of stakeholders over many months as we try to balance the needs of different types of websites while complying with the law,” he says.

Google, which generates 30 percent of its sales from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, views the DMA as disrespecting its expertise in what users want. Critics such as Yelp argue that Google sometimes siphons users away from the more reliable content they offer. Yelp competes with Google for advertisers but generated less than 1 percent of its record sales of $1.3 billion last year from outside the US. An increase in European traffic could significantly boost its business.

To study search changes, Yelp worked with user-research company Lyssna to watch how hundreds of consumers from around the world interacted with Google’s new EU search results page when asked to find a dinner spot in Paris. For searches like that or for other “local” businesses, as Google calls them, one new design features results from Google Maps data at the top of the page below the search bar but adds a new box widget lower down containing images from and links to reviews websites like Yelp.

The experiments found that about 73 percent of about 500 people using that new design clicked results that kept them inside Google’s ecosystem—an increase over the 55 percent who did so when the design Google is phasing out in Europe was tested with a smaller pool of roughly 250 people.

Yelp also tested a variation of the new design. In this version, which Google has shared with regulators, the new box featuring review websites is placed above the maps widget. It was more successful in drawing people to try alternatives to Google, with only about 44 percent of consumers in the experiment sticking with the search giant. Though the box and widget will be treated equally by Google’s search algorithms, the order the features appear in will vary based on those calculations. Yelp’s concern is that Google will win out too often.

Yelp proposed to EU regulators that to produce more fair outcomes, Google should instead amend the map widget on results pages to include business listings and ratings from numerous providers, placing data from Google’s directory right alongside Yelp and others.

Companies such as Yelp that are critical of the changes in testing have called on the European Commission to immediately open an investigation into Google on March 7, when enforcement of the DMA begins.

“Yelp urges regulators to compel Google to fully comply with both the letter and spirit of the DMA,” says Yelp’s vice president of public policy, David Segal. “Google will soon be in violation of both, because if you look at what Google has put forth, it’s pretty clear that its services still have the best real estate.”

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