Discussion
How did Google think adding AI overview would make them money? I'm not being sarcastic, I really want to know.
I assumed that they thought:
* It's what people want and will maintain market dominance with the public
* It's a new opportunity to sell a different more powerful (manipulative) kind of advertising placement to our customers
They seem to be pulling back because their customers (advertisers, not those who use them for search) are unhappy with the results.
@futurebird Companies mostly care about short-term stock price, to the extent that they sometimes forget about profit. And indeed, their stock price more than quadrupled since Gemini first released. It made "them" plenty of money, as shareholders.
I guess they were hoping they'd have a new fantasy to sell by the time this one ran out of steam, but here we are. https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/
@futurebird Main character syndrome. Google leadership literally don't know how they make money - they just think they Own The Internet™️ & therefore anything they do there = more money to them. Magic.
The ad network means GGL can literally sell infinite ads; no buyer has the slightest chance of knowing if they get what they're buying when Google ads are everywhere. With AI Overview anyone can tell that users are unlikely to ever see their ad, let alone click on it - so why spend money on it?
@futurebird Same logic as with fake top search result ads and Google maps "take me to a restaurant" I assume: the more you let the machine make decisions for you, the more you let the machine make your purchasing decisions for you. That's why they're all lusting after self driving cars. Each consumer in their own bubble, and the algo decides where you go, where you eat, where you shop, and plays you content and ads from their walled garden.
@futurebird I sincerely think it was an intuition on the part of key influencers within the company, who got inside of Larry's or Sergey's head & as a consequence the signal was sent company-wide that they were to never seriously be questioned.
The result was an underpants-gnome chain where the question-mark never really got exposed.
@futurebird they seem to be lost in the “attention economy” trap, trying to keep the users as long as possible in Google, instead of sending them to the source of the information.
The idea seem to be to move users from Google Search to Gemini
And if they do that how does it make them money? Gemini is expensive to run compared to what they were serving in the past.
@futurebird they Google Plused Google Search
@futurebird @wtrmt Insofar as there was a strategy behind it beyond FOMO, it might have been to trap users in Google, and then if you want access to Google's users, you have to pay for them.
No more free links!
No more free traffic!
Foundationally an effective search engine is essential to a modern civilization, it should not be a for-profit venture but the preserve of librarians living in devotion to the lofty aim of preservation, archiving and indexing of information.
If the people cannot find information? They perish.
Yet, we choose to leave the important work to a crass company whose main interest is selling you a refrigerator. Salesmen do not want you to know things or find the best deal. The purposes are crossed.
@futurebird Librarians are a great analogy to think about.
How would you assemble a *new* field of principled people (or machine behavior), aligned towards serving society, *when the field tempts with money and power*?
Do you have to first remove the money and power potential, to get only the desired aligned behavior?
At least we still have The Wikipedia. Isn't it strange how the wikipedia is the backbone of so much of modern information infrastructure? The very qualities that make it useful are those for profit businesses wish they could exploit and mine for a one-time bonanza of profit.
And we just cross our fingers and hope goodwill will protect the Library of Alexandria.
@futurebird As a contributor I support those sentiments
@futurebird well, the spanish-speaking wikipedia editors certainly didn't rely on goodwill; they fought Wales himself to protect what they built.
Sadly, the powers that be have enshittified WP.
I no longer give WMF my money because they use it to pay union-busting lawyers to bust their employees’ union. I stopped editing, too, after ~20 years and ~2000 edits.
--And support it financially, if we have the resources...
@futurebird <3 your post comes to me just as I am sitting down to finally write the story of how the Ukranian language Wikipedia navigated the invasion. You're right- it's a community that needs all the support we can give it.
@futurebird indirectly, by depriving (potential) competitors of page views and thus ad revenue, and by reducing public awareness of (potential) competitors by including their text but removing their branding