Google has been on a mission for years to stop letting users click through to other sites.
They started with the info boxes that extracted info from sites so you don’t have to click and read.
This is just a natural evolution of that.
They started with the info boxes that extracted info from sites so you don’t have to click and read.
This is just a natural evolution of that.
It seems like a simple business model: you give me answers, I give you a cut of the money I make off them, and I keep a piece of that money.
Then there are materials that are freely available but someone wants to stand in the way of them. For example, all of the wikipedia-but-with-ads hosts out there. Do we owe them anything? I say no. Do we owe anything to all of the journal indexes that try to convince you to pay $26 for the PDF of a paper from 1913 that's in the public domain anyway? I think not. And I don't think it is problematic if I ask Google whether Heidegger was a nazi, and Google answers with an answer instead of referring me to the gatekeepers of centrury-old information.
E.g. a summary of the minutes from your local city council, a respin of government economic statistics that answers a topical question, or a news investigation into a topic.
I'm ambivalent as to the business model that sustains that third class, but I resolutely think one needs to exist.
And Google, as currently constructed and operated, is not it. It doesn't originate content.
Ergo, passthrough of Google revenue to some entity that can / does do that seems reasonable.
The city council minutes would likely be published by the city. Nobody is entitled to revenue from that, it's paid for with tax dollars.
Government economics statistics are also published openly. I happened to have asked a bunch of questions about life expectancy and GDP recently and Google answered those questions with info boxes and links to the data sources. If I ask a question which can be answered in a few words, I'm perfectly content not to have to view ads to read an article from an economics wonk to manually find the tiny nugget I'm after.
And as for a news investigation, there's almost no question you could ask in isolation that would be better answered by reading a full article, I think. The person asking "Who is facing legal action in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre?" wants to get back "Alex Jones." They almost certainly didn't want to read a full article, and if they did, they'd click on it.
Which is to say, Google is doing nontrivial work to accomplish a specific outcome that the "third class" sources don't solve (and usually don't even try to solve). Besides, how do you know the content Google is pulling from...
1. Came from a single source and was not corroborated with multiple sources?
2. Wasn't just scraped from somewhere else or compiled with AI?
3. Isn't wrong? Should sources get paid for incorrect information?
A passthrough system creates perverse financial incentives to answer questions that someone might someday have, without caring about whether the answers to those questions are genuine and ethically produced. And frankly, that's far worse than what we have now.
Have you tried to look for yours, in a smaller city?
> Government economics statistics are also published openly
Certain statistics are published openly. However, the most useful derived statistics are a result of combining these with other data sets.
> And as for a news investigation, there's almost no question you could ask in isolation that would be better answered by reading a full article, I think
I'm not arguing excerpt vs full article. I'm arguing as to whether or not the full article exists in the first place.
There is a huge amount of critical, socially-useful information that requires effort, money, or skill to generate.
Previously, journalists created it.
Now, nobody does.
> Which is to say, Google is doing nontrivial work to accomplish a specific outcome...
What would Google be able to provide without content provided by underlying sources?
Nothing.
Google doesn't have reporters or posters. They provide platforms, then take a cut (or all) of the revenue generated by content on those platforms.
That's worth something, but it certainly doesn't deserve the 100% they're getting now.
> Besides, how do you know the content Google is pulling from...
Google knows. And if it doesn't, then it's unattributable content, which should open them up to legal liability.
ML/LLMs shouldn't be GPU-powered copyright washing machines: feed copyrighted content in, get uncopyrighted results out.
> A passthrough system creates perverse financial incentives to answer questions that someone might someday have, without caring about whether the answers to those questions are genuine and ethically produced. And frankly, that's far worse than what we have now.
You've literally described Google's current business model, and what they've turned the web into.
Should a professional programmer have to pay wikipedia if they read about an algorithm on it and then implement it and get paid for it?
I've been using both ChatGPT and Gemini (both the paid versions), more and more. My habit is to go search on Google, get frustrated I can't get a relevant result. As Gemini or ChatGPT and 2 of 3 times, get a useful answer.
At some point my habit will likely change to ChatGPT/Gemini first.
Like the OP. I type something cryptic (like keywords) into Google search vs typing 1 to 3 sentences into Gemini/ChatGPT. I should try typing the entire thing into Google search.
Interestingly this reminds me of stack overflow. Their search is legendarily bad but I'd often go start a new question, add tags, start typing my question in detail, and, in it's recommendations based on the content of my long form question it would find the relevant existing answer.