I think the bigger reason why search isn’t getting much better is that incremental technical improvements are being offset by Google trading their dominance for greater shareholder value. A safe business can take away or buy-and-bury features that are better for the customer but worse for the business’s top line. Things like the Power Search API, or search that integrates with other platforms that hurt Alphabet owned businesses.
Traditionally big innovation breaks some socio-political constraint on market participation. I don’t see how AI will do that yet.
NLP generative models that you can interrogate with natural language prompts, and which generate coherent responses together with citations for sources, is definitely the future of search.
I don't know anything about AI or the relationship between market participation and innovation. All I know is that LLMs are a useful tool that is already displacing search in many parts of my life.
I see. These sound like two different products, Google Search vs Google Scholar. I can imagine AI + natural language processing is dramatically changing search performance of dense-detailed text.
I think the bigger reason why search isn’t getting much better is that incremental technical improvements are being offset by Google trading their dominance for greater shareholder value. A safe business can take away or buy-and-bury features that are better for the customer but worse for the business’s top line. Things like the Power Search API, or search that integrates with other platforms that hurt Alphabet owned businesses.
Traditionally big innovation breaks some socio-political constraint on market participation. I don’t see how AI will do that yet.