Daniel Best’s Post

The way AI is going to change our search behaviours is profound, challenging, and perhaps not surprising. Clickbait and spam search results These have become so prevalant that search has become a profoundly poor user experience. It's perhaps no wonder that we prefer to find information pulled out and displayed in Google's preview box so that it's not neceessary to go digging through the search results to find the answer. It's also why, when learning a new coding technique I'll probably go straight to AI to get help with what I want to achieve. Profound behavioural change Assuming that search behavours change, who is going to miss trawling though pages of clickbait and spam to find what they are looking for. Surely few will mourn if sites that flood the results with links to duplicate content, or content of low relevance, fade from view. Challenging This will perhaps be a devastatingly huge challenge for news websites, SEO experts, and sites that rely on advertising, and the advertisers themselves. Google have to embrace the technology or face being overtaken by challengers. Given their dominance of search and SEO, how do they avoid shooting themselves in their technological foot as a result of killing SEO and advertising? And what about us, the businesses and entrepreneurs? In a few years, will there even be search results in which we get listed in? This feels like the proverbial 'seismic shift'. #google #ai #search #future #technology

Good piece by Casey Newton on Google disrupting its own search experience. “Google’s idea for the future of search is to deliver ever more answers within its walled garden, collapsing projects that would once have required a host of visits to individual web pages into a single answer delivered within Google itself. A quarter-century into its existence, a company that once proudly served as an entry point to a web that it nourished with traffic and advertising revenue has begun to abstract that all away into an input for its large language models. Until now, publishers have been able to rely on significant volumes of traffic coming from the blue links that appear under many queries. But what the company is now calling AI overviews often obscure these links, requiring users to click to see them, or simply abstracting them away in an automatically generated summary. Analysts who have studied the company’s early experiments with SGE say a bloodbath is coming. For everyone who depended even a little bit on web search to have their business discovered, or their blog post read, or their journalism funded, the arrival of AI search bodes ill for the future. Google will now do the Googling for you, and everyone who benefited from humans doing the Googling will very soon need to come up with a Plan B.” https://lnkd.in/e8Um26eF?

🔜 Google I/O 2024: Search is Evolving, Are You? At Google I/O 2024, Sundar Pichai introduced us to a new era of Google Search powered by Gemini AI. This isn't just an upgrade, it’s a complete transformation. Imagine asking Google to plan your vacation or solve a complex problem, and it does all the heavy lifting. With AI Overviews, Google is turning search results into detailed, organized insights rather than just a list of links. What’s exciting is that Gemini’s capabilities go beyond simple queries. It integrates with Google Maps, Photos, and other services. In my view, this shift is monumental for us in paid media and digital marketing. As AI reshapes search behavior, understanding and leveraging these changes will be crucial. The bar for engaging content is higher than ever. Are we ready to adapt and thrive in this new landscape? I’d say it’s time to buckle up and dive in. #GoogleIO #AI #WebTraffic #PaidMedia #SearchEngine Highly suggest reading this article: https://lnkd.in/dDz_x5U6

Remember how simple Google Search was 20 years ago? The search results page was a lot simpler than it is today. Well, guess what? Google has just brought back a slice of nostalgia by reintroducing a classic search mode without AI. Over the years, Google Search has changed a lot, adding useful features like typo suggestions and different search modes (images, news, and videos). But not all changes have been welcomed with open arms. Sponsored ads and the recent AI-powered 'Search Generative Experience' (SGE) left many people longing for the simpler times of pure, straightforward search results. In response to this, Google has introduced a new 'web' setting that lets you search like it’s 2000 again. This mode strips back all the extras—no images, no shopping results, no AI-generated answers—just a clean list of text-based links. You can find this new mode under the 'More' option just below the search bar. The response on social media has been overwhelmingly positive, with many people expressing their relief and excitement for this back-to-basics approach. For business owners who may feel apprehensive about the rapid advancement of AI, this move is a reassuring nod to simplicity and user preference. This throwback to classic search is a reminder that sometimes, less is more. Have you been missing the straightforward search experience?

Google's AI Search is Getting More Video and Better Links: Google's AI-powered Search Generative Experience is getting a big new feature: images and video. From a report: If you've enabled the AI-based SGE feature in Search Labs, you'll now start to see more multimedia in the colorful summary box at the top of your search results. Google's also working on making that summary box appear faster and adding more context to the links it puts in the box. SGE may still be in the "experiment" phase, but it's very clearly the future of Google Search. "It really gives us a chance to, now, not always be constrained in the way search was working before," CEO Sundar Pichai said on Alphabet's most recent earnings call. "It allows us to think outside the box." He then said that "over time, this will just be how search works." The SGE takeover raises huge, thorny questions about the very future of the web, but it's also just a tricky product to get right. Google is no longer simply trying to find good links for you every time you search -- it's trying to synthesize and generate relevant, true, helpful information. Video in particular could go a long way here: Google has integrated YouTube more and more into search results over the years, linking to a specific chapter or moment inside a video that might help you with that "why is my dryer making that noise" query. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is rolling out a new feature in Chrome that can summarize any web page in a few sentences. 👉 What it means: This feature (called "SGE while browsing") could change the way people consume online content. SGE is an early step in transforming the Search experience with generative AI. When using SGE, people will notice their search results page with familiar web results, organized in a new way to help them get more from a single search. 👇 How it works: SGE uses AI to extract the main points from any page and display them in a pop-up window. 👍 Benefits: - Users can save time and get the information they need without scrolling or clicking. - Comparing summaries from different sources to get a balanced view - Finding the information they need faster and easier 👎 Drawbacks: - Publishers may lose ad revenue and engagement if users don't visit their sites. - Competing with other summaries for user attention. 🌐 Big picture: SGE is expanding from Search to browser, as predicted by some experts. 💡 Our take: Google (and other tech companies) should leverage AI as a layer and apply it to every product to create more value. #google #ai #seo #sge #innovation #paidsearch #ppcadvertising #updates #trend2023

What exactly is a Google core update, and how can you best prepare for it? According to Google, a core update is "significant, broad changes to our search algorithms and systems. We refer to these as core updates, and we give notice when they happen on our list of Google Search ranking updates. Core updates are designed to ensure that we're delivering on our mission to present helpful and reliable results for searchers." If you're a brand using generative AI (or humans) to create content and you're still not following the guidelines for creating helpful content, you're going to experience some negative outcomes with this core update. Many brands have doubled down because they think AI-driven content is a cheap way to scale. But this core update is going to punch you right in the gut if you haven't created the right kinds of content. I don't mean to be doom and gloom, but the consequences are important because Google has never provided a list of what you should do to ensure you rank well, and there are 1000s of signals. And this one is important because there aren't specific actions that you can take. Google has stated, "Pages that experience a change after a core update might not have anything wrong to fix. That said, we understand that those who may not be performing as well after a core update change may still feel they need to do something. We suggest focusing on ensuring you're offering the best content you can. That's what our algorithms seek to reward." Learn more, including how to self-assess your website and its content: https://loom.ly/C8ozWYc #GoogleCoreUpdate2024 #SEOMarketing #ContentMarketing #JournalisticStorytelling

New Post: Google rolls out AI Overviews in US with more countries coming soon - https://lnkd.in/gQqFyYr6 - AI Overviews is rolling out to all US based searchers in Google Search, making AI Overviews available to hundreds of millions of searchers by next week, Liz Reid, the company’s new head of Search, announced at Google I/O. AI Overviews will launch in more countries soon and be available to more than a billion users by the end of the year. Hema Budaraju, the Senior Director of Product, Search Generative Experience, Google, told us that the link cards within AI Overviews generate a higher click-through rate than traditional web search results. However, Google will not break down impressions and click data for AI Overview links in Google Search Console. In addition to AI Overviews, Google is rolling out new Search Labs AI features, including multistep reasoning capabilities, planning capabilities, AI-organized search results, and a new Google Lens ask-with-video feature. What are AI Overviews? AI Overviews was introduced as part of the Search Generative Experience last May 2023. It was opt-in within the Google Search Labs, until Google began testing AI Overviews in the wild for a subset of users in March 2024. AI Overviews gives answers to queries using generative AI technology powered by Google Gemini. It provides a few snippets of an answer based on its understanding of queries and the content it found on the topic across the web. Here is a GIF of how AI Overviews look in Google Search: Limited queries. You won’t see AI Overviews for all your searches. AI Overviews are reserved to answer more complex questions where Google feels it can add value beyond the search results, Budaraju told us. If AI Overview doesn’t add value to what Google Search shows by default, Google will not show an AI Overview. Google would not say what percentage of queries will generate an AI Overview. I asked numerous times and was told, “we won’t share those figures.” I asked if we would see AI Overviews only when ads are not displayed, and I was told, that was not the case. The types of queries AI Overviews will show for have “less to do with ads” and more to do with adding value to the search results, Budaraju said. Reid wrote, “As always, ads will continue to appear in dedicated slots throughout the page, with clear labeling to distinguish between organic and sponsored results.” Google may show AI Overviews for health, medical and financial queries – the YMYL (your money, your life) queries. A recent study concluded Google is showing fewer AI Overviews since testing began a year ago. Plus, Onley shared similar data showing AI Overviews showing up a lot less often recently. Clicks. We speculated that when Google launches AI Overviews and SGE (by the way, AI Overview graduated from SGE and Labs, so we should call these AI Overviews and not SGE, Google told me), that Google would

Google CEO Sundar Pichai on AI-powered search and the future of the web in interview Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of the Verge: (…) people will value human-created experiences. (…) I think using AI to produce content en masse without adding any value is not what users are looking for. (...) But there is a big continuum and, over time, users are adapting. We are trying hard to make sure we do it in a responsible way, but we’re also listening to what users consider to be high quality and trying to get that balance right. That continuum will look different a few years out than it does today, but I think I view it as the essence of what search quality is. Do I feel confident we will be able to approach it better than others? Yes. Anna Wittenberg Artur 🤖 Kurasiński Dariusz Korda https://lnkd.in/dqwb4-Dw

Remember how simple Google Search was 20 years ago? The search results page was a lot simpler than it is today. Well, guess what? Google has just brought back a slice of nostalgia by reintroducing a classic search mode without AI. Over the years, Google Search has changed a lot, adding useful features like typo suggestions and different search modes (images, news, videos). But not all changes have been welcomed with open arms. Sponsored ads and the recent AI-powered 'Search Generative Experience' (SGE) left many people longing for the simpler times of pure, straightforward search results. In response to this, Google has introduced a new 'web' setting that lets you search like it’s 2000 again. This mode strips back all the extras – no images, no shopping results, no AI-generated answers – just a clean list of text-based links. You can find this new mode under the 'More' option just below the search bar. The response on social media has been overwhelmingly positive, with many people expressing their relief and excitement for this back-to-basics approach. For business owners who may feel apprehensive about the rapid advancement of AI, this move is a reassuring nod to simplicity and user preference. This throwback to classic search is a reminder that sometimes, less is more. Have you been missing the straightforward search experience? https://zurl.co/V6hK #GoogleSearch #AI #BackToBasics #MyriadTechnologies #ITServices #TechSupport #DigitalTransformation #FraservalleyTech #NonprofitSupport #CommunitySupport