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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 y

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.

jeffbee 3y ago
People don't want to click through, they want their question answered.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  Does Google pass through ad revenue to its sources for searches serviced by instant answers? 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.
  - jeffbee 3y ago
    I think there are different classes of result that we should discuss. First, there are pure facts. I know that weather.com wants to interpose between me and the weather forecast that my government produced for me using my tax money, but Google doesn't need to assent to weather.com's scheme. That is something they can just answer. In the same way, whether my local chaat stand is open on Tuesdays in not a fact that belongs to Yelp. 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.
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      There's a third class too, perhaps the most important one -- facts which take time, money, and/or skill to assemble. 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.
      - bastawhiz 3y ago
        > 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. 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.
        ethbr1 3y ago
  - juitpykyk 3y ago
    That's a slippery slope. 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?
    - beejiu 3y ago
      It's not a slippery slope at all. Wikipedia has a very clear and explicit licensing model - content can be used under Creative Commons.
      - juitpykyk 3y ago
        So do the sources that Google aggregates.
  - bastawhiz 3y ago
    If I search for how old Taylor Swift is, is a clickbait website entitled to the revenue from my visit? If I'm searching for an objective fact, nobody owns that knowledge. Arguably if I want an objective answer to a question and Google gives it to me, they're the ones who did the work in this case.
  - nox101 3y ago
    Does ChatGPT which is what the op was comparing to? 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.
  - mxd3 3y ago
    No, they don't. It's just a top position on Google. It's like showing up in the first position, but with way less click-through.
- acheron 3y ago
  People want their question answered accurately, which is many times more likely to happen after clicking through than by relying on some opaque Google process that may or may not have interpreted the information correctly.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  Doesn't that imply that they don't want a search-engine?

jeffbee 3y ago

People don't want to click through, they want their question answered.

ethbr1 3y ago
Does Google pass through ad revenue to its sources for searches serviced by instant answers? 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.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  I think there are different classes of result that we should discuss. First, there are pure facts. I know that weather.com wants to interpose between me and the weather forecast that my government produced for me using my tax money, but Google doesn't need to assent to weather.com's scheme. That is something they can just answer. In the same way, whether my local chaat stand is open on Tuesdays in not a fact that belongs to Yelp. 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.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    There's a third class too, perhaps the most important one -- facts which take time, money, and/or skill to assemble. 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.
    - bastawhiz 3y ago
      > 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. 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.
      - ethbr1 3y ago
- juitpykyk 3y ago
  That's a slippery slope. 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?
  - beejiu 3y ago
    It's not a slippery slope at all. Wikipedia has a very clear and explicit licensing model - content can be used under Creative Commons.
    - juitpykyk 3y ago
      So do the sources that Google aggregates.
- bastawhiz 3y ago
  If I search for how old Taylor Swift is, is a clickbait website entitled to the revenue from my visit? If I'm searching for an objective fact, nobody owns that knowledge. Arguably if I want an objective answer to a question and Google gives it to me, they're the ones who did the work in this case.
- nox101 3y ago
  Does ChatGPT which is what the op was comparing to? 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.
- mxd3 3y ago
  No, they don't. It's just a top position on Google. It's like showing up in the first position, but with way less click-through.
acheron 3y ago
People want their question answered accurately, which is many times more likely to happen after clicking through than by relying on some opaque Google process that may or may not have interpreted the information correctly.
denton-scratch 3y ago
Doesn't that imply that they don't want a search-engine?