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Big changes are underway for the internet’s most popular product, and Google (and the web) may never be the same.
One day in 2021, Google’s web search team presented leadership with what was, at the time, a novel proposal: Rather than just have the search engine serve up its familiar list of links, have a chatbot greet visitors at the search results page and offer to answer questions directly. This wasn’t necessarily a shocking idea. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai had been talking for years about redesigning Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, around artificial intelligence, and the organization ran DeepMind and Google Brain, two of the world’s most sophisticated AI labs.
Still, the team’s management bristled at the proposal, according to a former employee with direct knowledge of those conversations. Googlers rarely suggested tinkering with the search engine’s fundamental design. “It was self-regulation. People just weren’t daring to think the thoughts,” the former employee says. The division’s leadership worried that its latest AI, though promising, wasn’t accurate enough. And even if it worked perfectly, answering users’ questions with AI risked upending Google’s core business of mixing so-called organic links with a healthy dose of targeted ads. The idea died, at least for the time being.
For more than two decades, Google Search has ruled the web. It serves as the primary gateway to the internet for billions of people—it currently processes almost 200,000 queries each second, according to the digital marketing company Semrush Holdings Inc. Roughly two-thirds of all web traffic referrals come from the search engine. Search is also Google’s beating heart, generating more than $198 billion in revenue in 2024, almost 60% of Alphabet’s annual sales.
The machine is still humming away, but a chorus of discontent has been building among the web-going public in recent years. Users complain that Google results are increasingly larded with advertising and self-serving features. Its power over the web also means a substantial portion of the internet has been designed primarily not for human consumption but for Google’s own web scrapers. Junky sites with poorly researched listicles or aggregated product reviews seize prominent space in results, frustrating users and grabbing ad revenue from more useful websites less versed in search engine optimization. Tech critics (and lawyers representing the federal government in antitrust litigation) have been arguing that Google’s continued dominance in the face of such shortcomings is proof that the search market is no longer competitive.
Then in 2022, OpenAIintroduced something new. ChatGPT bore a notable resemblance to the 2021 proposal Google had rejected. Like the original version of Google, OpenAI’s chatbot provided a simple field for entering text and not much else. The results it spit out didn’t display ads above the real answers or offer links to long-winded recipe sites where multiple autoplaying videos made it hard to concentrate on the steps to make a chickpea salad. And even though its answers weren’t always right, the sheer novelty meant users gave OpenAI a level of grace they might not have extended to the long-running leader of the search world.
Around the time ChatGPT arrived, pushing through this inertia became the job of Elizabeth Reid. A veteran Googler, Reid joined the search team in 2021 and took over the unit in March 2024. Since then she’s ushered in some of the biggest changes to Google’s core product in years—most notably AI Overviews, which cedes the most prominent space on the search results page to AI-generated responses. In March the company said it will begin experimenting with “AI Mode,” a dedicated tab on its homepage that offers a chat-based search experience similar to what it had rejected four years ago.
Reid refers to her approach as a “constant evolution” rather than a complete overhaul. Her team is still struggling to define the purpose of Google Search in this new era, according to interviews with 21 current and former search executives and employees, most of whom requested anonymity to avoid straining professional relationships, plus more than two dozen other people in the tech and media industries.
Illustration: Cameron Galley for Bloomberg Businessweek
In the meantime, multiple independent web publishers say their traffic has been falling. They say AI Overviews poses a particular challenge because it presents information directly on Google’s own results pages that users previously would have gotten by clicking through to the websites where it originated. In February the online education company Chegg Inc. sued Alphabet, saying the search feature was cribbing Chegg’s own content, posing a dire warning to the company. Google’s conduct “threatens to leave the public with an increasingly unrecognizable internet experience, in which users never leave Google’s walled garden and receive only synthetic, error-ridden answers,” Chegg said in its suit. José Castañeda, a Google spokesperson, responded to the suit by saying the company would “defend against these meritless claims.”
AI’s impact on Google itself is just beginning to show. Its search engine is one of the most profitable technologies ever developed, and, more than two years after ChatGPT’s debut, there’s little evidence that this is changing, though some analysts anticipate slower search revenue growth in the coming years. The company made more than $200 billion in gross profit last year.
Still, Google is acting with urgency. Shortly after OpenAI released ChatGPT, Google reassigned more than 1,000 engineers, about 20% of the search engineering team, to generative AI efforts (albeit with only vague marching orders), according to a former Google employee. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Pichai, who’s said that AI is a bigger deal than fire or electricity, says the world is on the verge of a radical transformation in the way it interacts with information. “I think we are at 1% of what humanity’s information needs are today,” he says. “It’ll be obvious a decade or 20 years from now. And I think we are underestimating how early all of this is.” And so this is an existential moment for Google. It may also be an existential moment for the web itself.
Prior to ChatGPT, Google’s search team was deep into what Arvind Jain, who held the title of distinguished engineer at Google until 2014, called “maintenance mode.” Thousands of engineers tended to an internal code base to keep the profits rolling in. It was vast and full of relics from years past, including 100,000 lines of code to make a feature that allowed people to vote in the 13th season of American Idol. (The initial code base for Uber Technologies Inc.numbered about 10,000 lines.) Search engineers fought over the currency of the realm: latency, or how long a web page takes to load. New features risked increasing load times, so Google invented a system that one former manager likened to cap-and-trade schemes for carbon emissions. To release new projects, teams first had to show they’d reduced latency elsewhere, sending engineers on missions to make unrelated parts of Google Search slightly faster.
Other times they toiled on projects they knew were pointless. In 2020 a former Google manager was charged with helping a team of dozens of engineers who were working on a project to make web search infrastructure more efficient. About six months in, a vice president let slip that he had no intention of releasing the project. But he advised the manager to keep going so the engineers would have something to show their bosses at the end of the year. Not everyone at Google hated such assignments. One former employee says people sometimes found it relaxing to work on projects for which everyone knew the stakes were low. But the barriers to introducing products hurt morale among engineers and sparked tension between management and rank-and-filers. In 2021, Manu Cornet, a search engineer who was also Google’s resident cartoonist, captured the dynamic by sketching an image of a massive cargo ship with cannons, towers and cranes grafted on top of an aging hull patched with duct tape. Surveying the horizon from the deck, the captain remarks, “Poor execution speed. The rowers need a culture shift.”
Google did sometimes push the bounds of search, as it did in 2016 with Google Assistant, a feature to field simple voice commands, such as checking the weather or finding out who’d won the Warriors game. Many Googlers wanted to push this further, but momentum was tempered by uncertainty about how the product would work with its existing advertising-based business model, according to two people familiar with the matter, one of whom framed the debate as an early taste of the angst that generative AI would bring. “How the f--- do we put an ad on it?” the former manager says of voice search. “That’s when the real crisis started.”
Google’s role as a web indexer insulated it from the unreliability of the open internet: Because it was simply pointing to other sites, its users were less likely to blame it for things they found there. The company was periodically criticized for serving as a distribution system for scams and offensive content. But the reputational risks would clearly increase if Google began providing more information directly.
Google has been struggling with the implications of making that shift for more than a decade. In 2012 the company balked at releasing the Knowledge Graph, a collection of important facts about the world. The database, assembled by pulling information from sites Google scraped for search, could help the company respond to queries with direct answers and photographs. After months of work, it determined it had reached more than 95% accuracy, according to a former employee. But the product provided incorrect information in an internal presentation, and executives refused to give the green light. These hesitations would slow the company’s response to generative AI as well. “They had the burden of, Google speaks the truth,” says Jain, the former distinguished engineer.
Engineers eventually met Google’s bar, and the product went ahead that same year. Once the toolwas public, the dilemma switched from its accuracy to its impact on the economics of the web. The sites that Google pulled the information from relied on its search engine to send them web traffic and, often, ad revenue. Later, in internal meetings, Google executives argued the data was fair game because Google credited sources such as Wikipedia in small print beneath its answers, according to one of the former employees.
Googlers were well aware of the tension between the preferences of users, who liked getting information quickly, and the needs of websites that produced that information. “I don’t know what the right answer is,” Cornet says. “I would say that, at least as an employee, I felt like the focus on the user was a good enough reason for me to think that Google wasn’t trying to do anything nefarious—even though it may put some companies out of business.”
On the flip side, Google’s business model also supported services that were distinctly not useful for users but were tuned to extract ad revenue, like scammy product affiliate sites and clickbaity news aggregators. Within the past several years blog posts began appearing about the declining quality of Google Search. Users started trying to avoid low-quality sites with tricks such as appending the term “Reddit” to their queries in the hope of locating threads where the information was coming from real people.
“Google wasn’t trying to do anything nefarious—even though it may put some companies out of business”
It’s hard to empirically measure the quality of something as vast and ever-changing as Google Search. But academics who’ve studied the subject say quality has notably declined. “I think there really is a feeling of decay that is just widely felt,” says Emma Lurie, a doctoral candidate at the University of California at Berkeley who’s been studying search engines since 2017.
Some Googlers bristled at these complaints. Representatives for Google point to independent assessments determining that its results are higher quality than other search engines. “People have high expectations for search and what it does for them,” says Pandu Nayak, Google’s chief search scientist. “And when it delivers on those high expectations, they don’t notice it because it’s just working the way it should.”
Even within the company, criticism was mounting that Google was being guided by the wrong incentives. There’s natural tension between the search unit, which worked to produce the most useful results to users’ queries, and the advertising division, which looked to maximize the revenue those queries produced. To keep the priorities of the advertising division from distorting organic search results, those two divisions had traditionally been separated. Some Googlers felt the firewall was weakening as growth leveled off, according to two former employees who’d worked in search. In early 2019, Google declared a “Code Yellow,” because it might not meet its goals for search revenue for the quarter, according to documents unearthed in the US Department of Justice’s 2023 antitrust trial over Google’s search engine, which ultimately resulted in a federal judge’s ruling that Google maintained an illegal monopoly in search. (The company has said it will appeal.)
As part of the Code Yellow emergency, engineers from Google’s search and Chrome browser teams were reassigned to figure out why user queries had slowed. This trend spelled trouble for Google’s advertising business, because each query represents an opportunity to display a targeted ad. But the actions Google took to address this problem made then-search chief Ben Gomes uncomfortable. “I think it is good for us to aspire to query growth and to aspire to more users. But I think we are getting too involved with ads for the good of the product and company,” Gomes wrote in an email made public during the trial.
Google called off the Code Yellow seven weeks after it began, with Prabhakar Raghavan, then head of Google’s advertising division, praising “heroic” engineering for helping the company reach its revenue goals despite the slowdown in queries. Shortly thereafter, Gomes shifted into a new role in the educational division, and Raghavan became head of both search and ads—further eroding the divide in the eyes of some Googlers. When asked about such concerns, Pichai says that “commercial information is information, too,” and that advertising can be valuable as long as it’s clearly identified. “The true north is the users,” he says. “I think focusing on the users and focusing on quality ends up being the approach by which we will do it all.”
The 2019 concerns about query volume would seem quaint compared with the reaction to ChatGPT. Reid had joined the search team only 19 months before and was still learning how it differed from her previous posting at the company’s Maps division. “It’s like you’re the next-door neighbor who was always in the house, but not after bedtime,” Reid says. She pantomimes inspecting the depths of a closet. “You still have a lot to learn.”
Some people who worked at Google when ChatGPT arrived describe a panic sweeping through the company. But, recalling the moment as she guides a pair of Businessweekreporters around the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, while dressed in an outfit based on Google’s rainbow palette, Reid downplays the idea that the company was shaken by the news. There were plenty of people at Google old enough to remember when Microsoft Corp.’s 2009 release of the Bing search engine was seen as an existential threat. (It wasn’t.) Business as usual had generally worked, and some weren’t inclined to rock the boat. Reid, though, was ready to implement real changes. “She is very data-driven,” says Brian McClendon, who worked with her on Google Maps and is now a senior vice president at Niantic Inc. “She would not make a change based on hope, but if she believed she had the data, that this other way is better, she’d be a steamroller to get there.”
Full Article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/feat...-overhaul-racing-chatgpt-for-the-web-s-future
One day in 2021, Google’s web search team presented leadership with what was, at the time, a novel proposal: Rather than just have the search engine serve up its familiar list of links, have a chatbot greet visitors at the search results page and offer to answer questions directly. This wasn’t necessarily a shocking idea. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai had been talking for years about redesigning Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, around artificial intelligence, and the organization ran DeepMind and Google Brain, two of the world’s most sophisticated AI labs.
Still, the team’s management bristled at the proposal, according to a former employee with direct knowledge of those conversations. Googlers rarely suggested tinkering with the search engine’s fundamental design. “It was self-regulation. People just weren’t daring to think the thoughts,” the former employee says. The division’s leadership worried that its latest AI, though promising, wasn’t accurate enough. And even if it worked perfectly, answering users’ questions with AI risked upending Google’s core business of mixing so-called organic links with a healthy dose of targeted ads. The idea died, at least for the time being.
For more than two decades, Google Search has ruled the web. It serves as the primary gateway to the internet for billions of people—it currently processes almost 200,000 queries each second, according to the digital marketing company Semrush Holdings Inc. Roughly two-thirds of all web traffic referrals come from the search engine. Search is also Google’s beating heart, generating more than $198 billion in revenue in 2024, almost 60% of Alphabet’s annual sales.
The machine is still humming away, but a chorus of discontent has been building among the web-going public in recent years. Users complain that Google results are increasingly larded with advertising and self-serving features. Its power over the web also means a substantial portion of the internet has been designed primarily not for human consumption but for Google’s own web scrapers. Junky sites with poorly researched listicles or aggregated product reviews seize prominent space in results, frustrating users and grabbing ad revenue from more useful websites less versed in search engine optimization. Tech critics (and lawyers representing the federal government in antitrust litigation) have been arguing that Google’s continued dominance in the face of such shortcomings is proof that the search market is no longer competitive.
Then in 2022, OpenAIintroduced something new. ChatGPT bore a notable resemblance to the 2021 proposal Google had rejected. Like the original version of Google, OpenAI’s chatbot provided a simple field for entering text and not much else. The results it spit out didn’t display ads above the real answers or offer links to long-winded recipe sites where multiple autoplaying videos made it hard to concentrate on the steps to make a chickpea salad. And even though its answers weren’t always right, the sheer novelty meant users gave OpenAI a level of grace they might not have extended to the long-running leader of the search world.
One thing that really stung about ChatGPT’s rise was that it was built on Google’s own inventions. OpenAI’s chatbot uses an AI architecture that Google detailed in a now-legendary research paperpublished in 2017. The breakthrough, a system known as a transformer that helps AI models zero in on the most important pieces of information they’re analyzing, was free for all to use. That Google’s engineering team had woven the technology into search only in the safest of ways showed how much the company struggled to translate its AI breakthroughs into substantial consumer products.Around the time ChatGPT arrived, pushing through this inertia became the job of Elizabeth Reid. A veteran Googler, Reid joined the search team in 2021 and took over the unit in March 2024. Since then she’s ushered in some of the biggest changes to Google’s core product in years—most notably AI Overviews, which cedes the most prominent space on the search results page to AI-generated responses. In March the company said it will begin experimenting with “AI Mode,” a dedicated tab on its homepage that offers a chat-based search experience similar to what it had rejected four years ago.
Reid refers to her approach as a “constant evolution” rather than a complete overhaul. Her team is still struggling to define the purpose of Google Search in this new era, according to interviews with 21 current and former search executives and employees, most of whom requested anonymity to avoid straining professional relationships, plus more than two dozen other people in the tech and media industries.
Illustration: Cameron Galley for Bloomberg Businessweek
In the meantime, multiple independent web publishers say their traffic has been falling. They say AI Overviews poses a particular challenge because it presents information directly on Google’s own results pages that users previously would have gotten by clicking through to the websites where it originated. In February the online education company Chegg Inc. sued Alphabet, saying the search feature was cribbing Chegg’s own content, posing a dire warning to the company. Google’s conduct “threatens to leave the public with an increasingly unrecognizable internet experience, in which users never leave Google’s walled garden and receive only synthetic, error-ridden answers,” Chegg said in its suit. José Castañeda, a Google spokesperson, responded to the suit by saying the company would “defend against these meritless claims.”
AI’s impact on Google itself is just beginning to show. Its search engine is one of the most profitable technologies ever developed, and, more than two years after ChatGPT’s debut, there’s little evidence that this is changing, though some analysts anticipate slower search revenue growth in the coming years. The company made more than $200 billion in gross profit last year.
Still, Google is acting with urgency. Shortly after OpenAI released ChatGPT, Google reassigned more than 1,000 engineers, about 20% of the search engineering team, to generative AI efforts (albeit with only vague marching orders), according to a former Google employee. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Pichai, who’s said that AI is a bigger deal than fire or electricity, says the world is on the verge of a radical transformation in the way it interacts with information. “I think we are at 1% of what humanity’s information needs are today,” he says. “It’ll be obvious a decade or 20 years from now. And I think we are underestimating how early all of this is.” And so this is an existential moment for Google. It may also be an existential moment for the web itself.
Prior to ChatGPT, Google’s search team was deep into what Arvind Jain, who held the title of distinguished engineer at Google until 2014, called “maintenance mode.” Thousands of engineers tended to an internal code base to keep the profits rolling in. It was vast and full of relics from years past, including 100,000 lines of code to make a feature that allowed people to vote in the 13th season of American Idol. (The initial code base for Uber Technologies Inc.numbered about 10,000 lines.) Search engineers fought over the currency of the realm: latency, or how long a web page takes to load. New features risked increasing load times, so Google invented a system that one former manager likened to cap-and-trade schemes for carbon emissions. To release new projects, teams first had to show they’d reduced latency elsewhere, sending engineers on missions to make unrelated parts of Google Search slightly faster.
Other times they toiled on projects they knew were pointless. In 2020 a former Google manager was charged with helping a team of dozens of engineers who were working on a project to make web search infrastructure more efficient. About six months in, a vice president let slip that he had no intention of releasing the project. But he advised the manager to keep going so the engineers would have something to show their bosses at the end of the year. Not everyone at Google hated such assignments. One former employee says people sometimes found it relaxing to work on projects for which everyone knew the stakes were low. But the barriers to introducing products hurt morale among engineers and sparked tension between management and rank-and-filers. In 2021, Manu Cornet, a search engineer who was also Google’s resident cartoonist, captured the dynamic by sketching an image of a massive cargo ship with cannons, towers and cranes grafted on top of an aging hull patched with duct tape. Surveying the horizon from the deck, the captain remarks, “Poor execution speed. The rowers need a culture shift.”
Google did sometimes push the bounds of search, as it did in 2016 with Google Assistant, a feature to field simple voice commands, such as checking the weather or finding out who’d won the Warriors game. Many Googlers wanted to push this further, but momentum was tempered by uncertainty about how the product would work with its existing advertising-based business model, according to two people familiar with the matter, one of whom framed the debate as an early taste of the angst that generative AI would bring. “How the f--- do we put an ad on it?” the former manager says of voice search. “That’s when the real crisis started.”
Google’s role as a web indexer insulated it from the unreliability of the open internet: Because it was simply pointing to other sites, its users were less likely to blame it for things they found there. The company was periodically criticized for serving as a distribution system for scams and offensive content. But the reputational risks would clearly increase if Google began providing more information directly.
Google has been struggling with the implications of making that shift for more than a decade. In 2012 the company balked at releasing the Knowledge Graph, a collection of important facts about the world. The database, assembled by pulling information from sites Google scraped for search, could help the company respond to queries with direct answers and photographs. After months of work, it determined it had reached more than 95% accuracy, according to a former employee. But the product provided incorrect information in an internal presentation, and executives refused to give the green light. These hesitations would slow the company’s response to generative AI as well. “They had the burden of, Google speaks the truth,” says Jain, the former distinguished engineer.
Engineers eventually met Google’s bar, and the product went ahead that same year. Once the toolwas public, the dilemma switched from its accuracy to its impact on the economics of the web. The sites that Google pulled the information from relied on its search engine to send them web traffic and, often, ad revenue. Later, in internal meetings, Google executives argued the data was fair game because Google credited sources such as Wikipedia in small print beneath its answers, according to one of the former employees.
Googlers were well aware of the tension between the preferences of users, who liked getting information quickly, and the needs of websites that produced that information. “I don’t know what the right answer is,” Cornet says. “I would say that, at least as an employee, I felt like the focus on the user was a good enough reason for me to think that Google wasn’t trying to do anything nefarious—even though it may put some companies out of business.”
On the flip side, Google’s business model also supported services that were distinctly not useful for users but were tuned to extract ad revenue, like scammy product affiliate sites and clickbaity news aggregators. Within the past several years blog posts began appearing about the declining quality of Google Search. Users started trying to avoid low-quality sites with tricks such as appending the term “Reddit” to their queries in the hope of locating threads where the information was coming from real people.
“Google wasn’t trying to do anything nefarious—even though it may put some companies out of business”
It’s hard to empirically measure the quality of something as vast and ever-changing as Google Search. But academics who’ve studied the subject say quality has notably declined. “I think there really is a feeling of decay that is just widely felt,” says Emma Lurie, a doctoral candidate at the University of California at Berkeley who’s been studying search engines since 2017.
Some Googlers bristled at these complaints. Representatives for Google point to independent assessments determining that its results are higher quality than other search engines. “People have high expectations for search and what it does for them,” says Pandu Nayak, Google’s chief search scientist. “And when it delivers on those high expectations, they don’t notice it because it’s just working the way it should.”
Even within the company, criticism was mounting that Google was being guided by the wrong incentives. There’s natural tension between the search unit, which worked to produce the most useful results to users’ queries, and the advertising division, which looked to maximize the revenue those queries produced. To keep the priorities of the advertising division from distorting organic search results, those two divisions had traditionally been separated. Some Googlers felt the firewall was weakening as growth leveled off, according to two former employees who’d worked in search. In early 2019, Google declared a “Code Yellow,” because it might not meet its goals for search revenue for the quarter, according to documents unearthed in the US Department of Justice’s 2023 antitrust trial over Google’s search engine, which ultimately resulted in a federal judge’s ruling that Google maintained an illegal monopoly in search. (The company has said it will appeal.)
As part of the Code Yellow emergency, engineers from Google’s search and Chrome browser teams were reassigned to figure out why user queries had slowed. This trend spelled trouble for Google’s advertising business, because each query represents an opportunity to display a targeted ad. But the actions Google took to address this problem made then-search chief Ben Gomes uncomfortable. “I think it is good for us to aspire to query growth and to aspire to more users. But I think we are getting too involved with ads for the good of the product and company,” Gomes wrote in an email made public during the trial.
Google called off the Code Yellow seven weeks after it began, with Prabhakar Raghavan, then head of Google’s advertising division, praising “heroic” engineering for helping the company reach its revenue goals despite the slowdown in queries. Shortly thereafter, Gomes shifted into a new role in the educational division, and Raghavan became head of both search and ads—further eroding the divide in the eyes of some Googlers. When asked about such concerns, Pichai says that “commercial information is information, too,” and that advertising can be valuable as long as it’s clearly identified. “The true north is the users,” he says. “I think focusing on the users and focusing on quality ends up being the approach by which we will do it all.”
The 2019 concerns about query volume would seem quaint compared with the reaction to ChatGPT. Reid had joined the search team only 19 months before and was still learning how it differed from her previous posting at the company’s Maps division. “It’s like you’re the next-door neighbor who was always in the house, but not after bedtime,” Reid says. She pantomimes inspecting the depths of a closet. “You still have a lot to learn.”
Some people who worked at Google when ChatGPT arrived describe a panic sweeping through the company. But, recalling the moment as she guides a pair of Businessweekreporters around the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, while dressed in an outfit based on Google’s rainbow palette, Reid downplays the idea that the company was shaken by the news. There were plenty of people at Google old enough to remember when Microsoft Corp.’s 2009 release of the Bing search engine was seen as an existential threat. (It wasn’t.) Business as usual had generally worked, and some weren’t inclined to rock the boat. Reid, though, was ready to implement real changes. “She is very data-driven,” says Brian McClendon, who worked with her on Google Maps and is now a senior vice president at Niantic Inc. “She would not make a change based on hope, but if she believed she had the data, that this other way is better, she’d be a steamroller to get there.”
Full Article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/feat...-overhaul-racing-chatgpt-for-the-web-s-future
