Why search engine results are going to be harder to verify than ever
The announcements coming out of Google I/O last week about using machine learning algorithms in all of its products, after ChatGPT caught it on the back foot make it clear that generative algorithms are the future whether we like it or not, and will be the central feature of search engines.
Search engines, and Google, with a 92% market share, are now a fundamental part of our lives. It is estimated that there are 90,460 Google searches worldwide every second; that’s 5.4 million searches per minute. The next search engine by market share is Bing, with 2.69%, followed by Yahoo!, Baidu, Yandex and DuckDuckGo.
Until now, the results of these searches were mostly better or worse, or editorialized variations of Google’s ten blue links dating back more than two decades. Now, Google wants us to forget the ten blue links and embrace the new philosophy of an algorithm that organizes information for us and returns the results of our search in the form of an organized and well-written paragraph. Nothing that Bing wasn’t already doing or that you can’t do with Perplexity.ai, which I’ve been using on my smartphone for several weeks now for quick searches, but with one big difference: Bing offered it to a very small percentage of users, while what Google does will impact the habits and customs of a huge chunk of the…
