Despite some evidence to the contrary I believe most people aren't that stupid and the "average person" isn't actually typing in these queries, these are marginal cases played out for meme value.
It highlights the underlying problem, which is that Google has built up trust over 20 years that they will return the best results from the web. Now they undermine that trust by shoving AI results at the top and calling it answers.
It doesn't take much imagination the think of non-meme questions that will propogate wrong information.
"Fake info from trusted sources" isn't a hypothetical issue. When they changed the law that required TV news to be factual we quickly headed down the path of Fox News and MSNBC. They are so effective precisely because Boomers grew up fully trusting news sources.
You can argue that it is not a problem and that people know the difference, but we have plenty of real-life proof to the contrary.
More consequential queries probably have better safeguards, this hullabaloo is about long tail nonsense that doesn't matter, they're kinks to be ironed out.
It's just missing the wow factor, they can still turn it around if the rumors about the new pixie assistant are true but so far yesterday's preemptive OpenAI event seems like it was unnecessary.
Targeted ads like the other guy said, and I also want to say specifically that that is useful to Google both for users who are signed out, and users who have separate personal accounts on their different devices, and also useful because they can figure out the same person using a device and account issued from their work and using a personal account on their personal device is the same person.
For example at my job we have a work-issued Google account that I use on the work laptop for their Gmail and Google Calendar. And on my phone I am signed in to Google with my personal account because I use YouTube on my phone.
This seems farfetched, I mean if you're teaching non English speakers to enunciate correctly then their speech patterns are changing over time and you're left chasing a moving target. There are probably better ways to target ads.
It is probably massively better for niche technical searches which many technical people here do for their job, that is the Kagis userbase after all.
But such searches doesn't generate much ad revenue, so it doesn't do much to Google to lose them, all the people searching for articles about makeup or clothes or games or other things that has strong advertisement potential Google is awesome as a search engine, I haven't seen anyone say Kagi is better there. Kagi is only better for the searches that Google doesn't care about since they generate so little ad revue, Google uses so much compute per search that I'm not even sure such technical searches would be profitable for them to run, likely that would increase profits to lose them to Kagi.
Private equity firms are buying up local news outfits then lobby to force google/fb to pay up. It's an extortion racket which news outlets refuse to cover for some reason.
All LLMs are inherently untrustworthy, they can be great to get the ball rolling so to speak but you have to double check everything they generate which is its own kind of overhead.
You'd think they're evil too if they let a bunch of middlemen and parasitic companies dictate how the software you invested untold sums and hours developing and marketing should work.
Also we're only talking about a handful of examples out of billions of queries, that doesn't stop the usual media hyperventilating though.
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