Somehow, I missed the eclipse the other evening. I was travelling and ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time to catch a glimpse of the moon obscuring the sun. Indeed, I arrived at a motorway services at around the time the eclipse was due, to find hundreds of people standing by their cars all looking through special glasses, or holding up a cardboard box that served as a pinhole camera. But it turns out they were just seeing the last remnants of the eclipse and I was too late again…! I had searched Google for the relevant times and places, but my journey just didn’t quite match.
The following morning when listening to the radio, I discovered that I had not been the only person searching on Google for information about the eclipse. Indeed, according to Google, there had been an 800% surge in searches for help in dealing with sore eyes during the previous few hours. My search for information about the eclipse, and the huge rise in people subsequently searching for information about painful eyes, shows just how reliant we have become on Google.
However, maybe it is time to reconsider our relationship with that behemoth of finding things out. Like me, you will have noticed that when you search for something on Google you mostly now get an “AI Overview” of information before you see any search results. Just a few months ago, the magazine Search Engine Land revealed that clicks on search listings have dropped by 42%. That’s due to the fact that people are using the information in the AI Overview instead. This is bad for business. As the Guardian newspaper revealed a year ago, companies that are at the top of the search results lose up to 79% of their traffic when there is an AI Overview above them.
Further changes at Google are leading us away from traditional search results. Earlier this year they introduced the “Intelligent Search Box”. This now replaces the old box in the centre of the Google search page where you enter your request. The intelligence is deliberately designed to steer you towards AI-derived material. Indeed, you may have noticed that when you look at the Google search box, there is a drop-down list of items. These are all your previous interactions with Google’s AI search system.
In the past, you could switch off this display of previous or trending items. Now, though, that ability has been removed. There is no way of preventing this list from appearing, unless you play about with ad-blockers. You might think that you could prevent this list from appearing by not engaging with the AI overview system. But as Google points out in its FAQs, the AI system is a “search feature” and “cannot be turned off”.
In addition, Google has recently confirmed that it is conducting an experiment where an AI-powered search page replaces the traditional search box. The “Android Headlines” news source says that Google’s changes that are focusing on AI demonstrate “the company’s aggressive push to pivot its core search experience”.
In other words, if you have got used to making your own decisions as to what to click on, and what to accept or reject from Google’s search engine results, you are going to have to get used to a new world. That world is where Google will be making many of those decisions for you. From everything I have read about this topic, it seems like a strategic move by Google to shift away from traditional search in a significant way.
Of course, Google has never promised to show you some objectively ‘best’ set of results. It ranks them according to its own systems, which businesses and search-engine optimisers have spent decades trying to influence. However, with traditional Google search, as users, we still did much of the final selection and synthesis. With an AI Overview, Google increasingly ranks, selects, and synthesises information before we encounter the underlying sources, even if we go that far.
Google’s AI system will now do much of the filtering we might otherwise do ourselves. Some might argue this will save us time and produce clearer, more reliable results. But it depends on how good the AI is.
Is there anything you can do about it? Well, you could accept it and just go along with things, because there is no way you can take on the search giants and get them to change their ways. Or you could learn more about writing good search queries for the age of AI-enabled search. Alternatively, you could switch to a service like Brave, which offers strong privacy and operates as a traditional search engine without the AI interference of Google.
What you probably can’t do is keep using Google in quite the same way you always have. Google is shifting from a service that points us to answers to one that increasingly provides the answer itself. That means we need to become more conscious of what has already been selected, filtered and interpreted for us. If you don’t adapt the way you search and the way your business expects to be found, that could increasingly become a problem.
