• megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    3 hours ago

    Part of me feels like google is comfortable allowing their traditional search experience to languish because it makes ai more necessary

    Oh, it’s so much worse than that, Google intentionally made it worse around 2019 so that people would do multiple searches and scroll to second pages, thus increasing the amount of ad impressions and user time spent on the site. There were several email back and forth between the head of search and head of advertising, with the head of search adamantly refusing to implement the changes. Eventually he ended up leaving despite having been at the company from the beginning due to this disagreement. The head of advertising during this? He’s the CEO now.

    Replacing search altogether with AI summarization is just a continuation of that, instead of delaying customers going to other sites, prevent them from going to them all together.

    • Cris_Citrus@piefed.zip
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      38 minutes ago

      That was sundar pichai? Or someone else? Do you know what terms I’d need to look up to find sources for that? Thats information I’d absolutely like to include when talking about this with people, thank you for filling me in, I had no idea about that and it adds a lot of substance to that point