As a person with endless questions, Google search regularly helps me scratch an itch that begs for more information. The search engine is a revolutionary tool no doubt, but internet users are seemingly fed up with search result pages filled with content that is unreliable or unrelated to their search. Generative AI systems such as ChatGPT are taking over as the most optimal informational tools, and Google has adapted with an AI of their own.
Finding accurate results used to take minimal effort from internet users, but with the amount of content on the web multiplying, finding what you’re looking for is like pulling teeth. The Google support forum is filled with users venting their frustrations after combing through several search pages of results that fail to answer their questions. “When I do a very basic generic search, I only get one or two actual results and even those are barely related to the subject. The quality of the results is so bad that they are unusable,” wrote one user in 2019.
A spike in the number of webpages on the internet makes it increasingly difficult for a search engine to present users with the information they’re looking for. Not only are there trillions of URLs on the web, but a form of digital marketing called search engine optimization contaminates search results by boosting the ranking of webpages filled with hot keywords and irrelevant information.
Website creators often prioritize the ranking of their pages over providing helpful and accurate content, resulting in search pages filled with irrelevant websites. “There’s a lot of economic incentive for misinformation, for clicks, for purchases,” said Marissa Mayer, former Google engineer in an interview with Search Engine Journal. Hired in 1999, Mayer was one of the company’s first employees to write code for the search engine. To tackle such issues, the company has made algorithmic updates to their search engine to filter out spam and unhelpful content.
As a never-ending amount of content is shared on the internet, users and developers alike must adapt. “We need to adapt to sort good information from bad information,” said Shahidul Islam, a professor of California State University, Monterey Bay’s Design and Analysis of Algorithms class.
He continued, “adapting is the most important biological feature we have. But we also tend to resist change … [generative AI] is better, but people will find a way to manipulate it.”
Islam teaches students that an algorithm is a sequence of clear instructions designed for solving a problem, and serves the purpose its creator chooses. Despite Google’s algorithm updates, the search engine does not effectively combat the overwhelming amount of spam on the web.
While search engines can effectively scour the internet for pages relating to given keywords, they fail to decipher the difference between high and low quality content. This is where generative AI comes in.
Google SGE, an AI users can add to Google search, is exponentially more efficient at answering specific questions than a plain old search engine. The generative AI observes patterns from collected data and makes correlations to produce new, contextually relevant results based on given prompts.
When technological tools are developed, they may introduce their own bumps in the road until a new tool is created, and the feedback loop starts again. As we seek answers to our questions, making the most of the technology available to us enables us to access the power of information.