Misc – Page 11 – mathewingram.com/work

Whenever Google makes a change to its search product, it inevitably generates a lot of anxiety among news outlets, many of which rely on the revenue that they get from traffic driven by the platform. But the response to the company’s most recent announcement was arguably a class apart. “It’s the End of Google Search As We Know It,” read a headline in Wired. Danielle Coffey, the CEO of the News Media Alliance, a lobby group that represents newspapers and other publishers, told CNN that the changes would be “catastrophic” for its members; others called the Google news a “death blow.” Nilay Patel, the editor in chief of The Verge, argued that the latest changes will accelerate what he calls “Google Zero,” whereby Google search traffic vanishes completely for some publishers.

The changes in question involve a fundamental reworking of Google’s search product, which will incorporate a variety of features powered by the company’s artificial intelligence engine, which it calls Gemini. (The new features were announced last week at Google’s annual developer conference in Mountain View, California, an event known as I/O.) As Wired explained, the latest announcement is the culmination of a series of moves that Google has made over the past year or so. Last year, the company created a separate section of its Search Labs—which allows users to experiment with new features—for what the company called Search Generative Experience. The announcement last week essentially incorporates those experimental features into the main search product.

The most obvious change is that, for many searches, AI-generated summaries of the information a user has requested will appear at the top of the search page, above Google’s traditional blue links; when a journalist from Wired asked, for example, where the best place to see the aurora borealis would be, Google’s AI-generated response advised the Arctic Circle as part of a longer passage of text. Liz Reid, the head of Google’s search team, told Wired that AI answers won’t appear for simple searches that could be satisfied by linking to a specific website, but will be used for more complex queries. (If you want the old-fashioned results without the AI summary, you can still get them by clicking on the “Web” heading under the “More” tab at the top of the search page. According to a number of reports, you could also try adding a few characters to your Google search URL.)

Note: this post was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer