business model

Trafficked++

~ Taran ~ 3 Comments

It’s not a mistake that I was writing about practical communication earlier this morning, because on the Internet there are different rules if you’re concerned about traffic to your content.

There’s all manner of Search Engine Optimization stuff, from linking to similar content to being linked to from similar content, to using words and phrases commonly searched for… to… well, SEO is not as easy as it once was.

Writing with SEO in mind is not an easy task if one wants to have readable content. Sure, people might end up staring at your content because you’re a wizard at marketing your content through SEO and other means, but it doesn’t mean your content is actually useful. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried researching something and falling into what I call ‘ambiguity traps’.

For example, yesterday I was trying to figure out how to set the default volume on a Windows 10 machine when it boots so I don’t have to always turn down the sound. That got me finding things about everything but what I was searching for, and after interrogating a few search engines that gave me results about the drive volume instead of the sound volume, I realized that Microsoft didn’t seem to have the capability I was looking for.

A useful piece of content might have been, “Nope. You’re out of luck. You can’t do that.”. Of course, there’s the outside chance that there’s some secret setting hidden somewhere in the registry that makes it all possible, but I do not feel the need to sacrifice a farm animal and do the hokey pokey.

Generally speaking, on the Internet, it’s not as much about being useful as it is driving traffic to get advertising impressions. A few sites actually care about the content, and those sites aren’t commercial sites unless they’re hidden behind a paywall, which means their content likely doesn’t get indexed by the search engine bots.

And that’s what Web 2.0 gave us from the technological tropism. It doesn’t end there.

If you haven’t seen the BewareOfImages.com documentary (2016), just follow the link or click the image above to go see it. It’s 2 hours and 40 minutes long, but worth the watch so go grab a beverage and snacks when you do.

Somewhere during all of this, opinions gained traction over news, and then we got into fake news. If you watch the BewareOfImages documentary, you’ll see that this isn’t all that new either. It seems like a recurring theme.

All of this, quite possibly, makes it into the large language models that are so hyped right now.

What could possibly go wrong? In the broad strokes, that’s what some of us are worried about.

Google, AI, and Search.

~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

It’s no secret that Google is in the AI “arms race”, as it has been called, and there is some criticism that they’re in too much of a hurry.

“…The [AI] answer is displayed at the top, and on the left are links to sites from which it drew its answer. But this will look very different on the smaller screen of a mobile device. Users will need to scroll down to see those sources, never mind other sites that might be useful to their search.

That should worry both Google’s users and paying customers like advertisers and website publishers. More than 60% of Google searches in the US occur on mobile phones. That means for most people, Google’s AI answer will take up most of the phone screen. Will people keep scrolling around, looking for citations to tap? Probably not…”

Google Is in Too Much of a Hurry on AI Search, Parmy Olson, Bloomberg (via Washington Post), May 12th, 2023.

This could have a pretty devastating effect on Web 2.0 business models, which evolved around search engine results. That, in turn, could be bad for Google’s business model as it stands, which seems to indicate that their business model will be evolving soon too.

Will they go to a subscription model for users? It would be something that makes sense – if they didn’t have competition. They do. The other shoe on this has to drop. One thing we can expect from Google is that they have thought this through, and as an 800 lb gorilla that admonishes those that don’t follow standards, it will be interesting to see how the industry reacts.

It may change, and people are already advocating that somewhat.

“…Google Search’s biggest strength, in my opinion, was its perfect simplicity. Punch in some words, and the machine gives you everything the internet has to offer on the subject, with every link neatly cataloged and sorted in order of relevance. Sure, most of us will only ever click the first link it presents – god forbid we venture to the dark recesses of the second page of results – but that was enough. It didn’t need to change; it didn’t need this.

There’s an argument to be made that search AI isn’t for simple inquiries. It’s not useful for telling you the time in Tokyo right now, Google can do that fine already. It’s for the niche interrogations: stuff like ‘best restaurant in Shibuya, Tokyo for a vegan and a lactose intolerant person who doesn’t like tofu’. While existing deep-learning models might struggle a bit, we’re not that far off AIs being able to provide concise and accurate answers to queries like that…”

Cramming AI into search results proves Google has forgotten what made it good, Christian Guyton, TechRadar, 5/11/2023

Guyton’s article (linked above in the citation) is well worth the read in it’s entirety. It has pictures and everything.

The bottom line on all of this is that we don’t know what the AI’s are trained on, we don’t know how it’s going to affect business models for online publishers, and we don’t know if it’s actually going to improve the user experience.