The Google search engine is experiencing the most important revolution in its history. For now it’s being a disaster

Google has been rampant in the last quarter of a century on the Internet. Its search engine has dominated absolutely everything, but the arrival of ChatGPT posed a disturbing question from the first moment: what if it were better to search with ChatGPT than with the Google search engine? The Mountain View company is trying to prepare for that future with its own AI search engine, but at the moment its performance is being highly criticized.

AI Overview. That’s what the new ones are called snippets on the Google results page. Initially available in the United States, this option allows users to obtain an answer to their query that will be generated by Google’s AI model. The function was presented at Google I/O 2024, and is an evolution of the Search Generative Experience that we were able to test months ago.

But the AI ​​that searches is being a bit of a disaster. The problem with those AI-generated responses is the same problem that affects all chatbots: that they invent things. These days we learned about the singular case of cheese and pizza, but there have been many other errors that users also have shared on Twitter. The danger for Google is that no one trusts this feature, and the company is doing something unusual.

If it’s wrong, we delete it. On Google they are deleting results search results generated by AI that detects that they are erroneous. A Google spokesperson confirmed this. in The Verge, and indicated that they are “taking swift action” to remove AI summaries in certain queries. They do so, he highlights, “when appropriate under our content policies, and use these examples to develop broader improvements to our systems, some of which have already begun to be implemented.”

I no longer receive visits from Google. The other big problem of this revolution is the one that affects content creators and the media: Google and its search engine have been key sources of traffic for years—and therefore, of advertising revenue—but that traffic generated by Google it is changing. It already did it with those snippets that made it so that one did not have to leave Google, but the answers generated by AI make content creators’ concerns grow.

Changes in Google’s algorithm favor its search results and cause those who create the original content to stop receiving visits. The threat to those who create this content (Xataka included) is obvious. Source: BBC/SEMrush.

Why go to your website, I have everything in the search engine. At Google they have always defended that the web ecosystem is crucial, but at the same time they have made efforts to show increasingly better answers in the search engine and avoid clicking for the user. A SEMrush study published on BBC It shows how traffic on several websites has not stopped decreasing or at most has barely remained stable after the latest changes to the search engine. The fear, of course, is that this trend will continue over time.

I use Google to search Reddit. A good part of the internet is seeing its traffic affected after these changes, but there is a platform that is going against the tide. This is Reddit, which has been gaining relevance for having “human” opinions, responses and experiences, which makes many users use the Google search engine adding “site:reddit” so that the results focus on those of that site. community.

The danger of Google’s obsession with AI. The company was cautious about launching solutions like Bard (now Gemini) because it knew its accuracy was limited. The push from Microsoft and OpenAI has forced the pace to accelerate, and for now that is causing them to force AI everywhere. This is also generating problems that affect its reputation—and internal criticism—, especially because users do not expect (at the moment) that ChatGPT will answer everything correctly, but we do expect the Google search engine to do so.

Image | Javier Pastor with Midjourney

In Xataka | I’ve been testing alternatives to Google for years. None has convinced me as much as Perplexity