Google’s notoriously wonky AI Overviews feature — you know, the one that repeatedly makes up facts and literally tells users to eat rocks — is about to get a whole lot more annoying.
On Thursday, the tech giant announced that its AI-generated search summaries will now begin to show ads above, below, and within them, as a way of demonstrating that the technology is capable of actually making money.
It will also serve to assuage concerns that AI chatbots could eat into search ad revenues, which are Google’s biggest cash cow.
Now, if you search how to get a grass stain out of jeans, as seen in an example in Google’s blog post, you’ll get an AI summary which contains a carousel of relevant website links, plus a heavy helping of “Sponsored” ads for stain removers. Revolutionary stuff.
There’s no way on Satan’s green earth that a small startup company started in 2018 has a search engine index as large and fast as the one started 30 years ago and has been indexing the entire internet since then (Google). Even Microsoft can’t compete without dumping billions of dollars into Bing by forcing people to use it as default on their operating systems, renting/purchasing the now ancient Yahoo indexing databases, leeching software engineer talent from competitors with promises of huge paychecks, and greasing hands in China.