Tripp Mickle, Kate Conger, and Brian X. Chen, opening The New York Times’s report on yesterday’s Google I/O keynote (gift link):
For 25 years, Google’s iconic search box was a long, slender bar
where people typed in keywords like “World Cup.”But over the past three years, artificial intelligence allowed
people to type in longer, more complex questions like “Who are the
top 24 teams in the World Cup and what chance does the United
States have of advancing?”On Tuesday, Google said the A.I. shift had inspired it to overhaul
the dimensions of its search bar for the first time since 2001.
The box is getting bigger and more interactive so that people can
ask even longer questions and upload photographs and videos into
queries.
Interesting to me that this is the Times’s biggest takeaway. But it speaks to how unchanged the google.com homepage has been since its earliest days.
In addition, people can ask follow-up questions with a chatbot on
Google’s main search page. The company will also offer digital
assistants, known as agents, to automate searches so that someone
who may be apartment hunting can be notified of a new listing
without opening a real estate site like Zillow.
Odd, to me, to paint this only in terms of user convenience (ostensible user convenience at that), and not in terms of this being a de facto attack on Zillow and the rest of the web. Later in the Times report:
Richard Kramer, a financial analyst with Arete Research, said the
changes were helping Google make more money from advertising. Last
year, Google’s ad clicks rose 6 percent, and it charged 7 percent
more for each click. The company’s annual profit has more than
doubled since 2022 to $132 billion.“The open web is on its way out,” Mr. Kramer said, referring to
the way internet traffic now often begins and ends with a visit to
Google rather than visiting other sites. “With A.I., Google is
reducing everyone to raw data providers.”
What an odd statement to include in the middle of an article without any acknowledgement of what a profound loss that would be, if Kramer is correct. It’s as though Kramer said that light mode is on its way out, everyone is into dark mode these days.
