Possibly, but it makes more sense when viewed through the lens of "Google is an advertising company" rather than a search company.
Also, it's not like Google went on autopilot and pursued nothing in recent years. Clearly they've dedicated resources to AI, so it's not hard to believe they foresaw potential resistance to selling the concept of AI to users and took measures to funnel them into the behavior Google desired, all the while making it appear as a choice the user was making.
Google famously solved the search problem and the spam problem, and technology has only gotten more capable since then. Suggesting that blogspam etc are too difficult to defeat is a tough sell imo.
> it's not hard to believe they foresaw potential resistance to selling the concept of AI to users and took measures to funnel them into the behavior Google desired
I find that very hard to believe because it implies a level of foresight that we have not observed from Google. The notion that they degraded their own search on purpose for years to funnel people to AI seems very implausible, especially since they don’t have a good model yet for replacing that ad revenue within AI, and that level of foresight would also imply that they should have beaten OpenAI to the punch instead of reacting to ChatGPT.
> especially since they don’t have a good model yet for replacing that ad revenue within AI
This would be a calculated financial bet on their part. This kind of risk taking is not limited to SV startups.
I realize companies under late stage capitalism aren't typically known for having foresight past one quarter, but that doesn't mean some of them can't have somebody optimizing for the long-term in a financial sense.
It's seems premature to rule this possibility out entirely.
Occam‘s razor says prefer the simpler explanation.
It is possible that Google as an organization had enough foresight to see that search would eventually be eaten by AI chat bots and so intentionally degraded the experience of search to encourage movement in that direction. And also that Google was too dumb to actually ship their chat bot first and capitalized on their choice to sabotage search.
It seems a lot more likely that the the decline in the quality of search is due to a combination of hyper-optimization for revenue and difficulty combating large scale spam farms.
> We saw it begin years ago with Google etc gradually reducing the quality of search results. Then ChatGPT etc arrive shortly thereafter, and people are led to conclude "it works so much better than traditional search." Hard to believe these two events are unrelated.
So Google ruined search so they could give their market share to ChatGPT. 4D chess. Maybe 5D even.
If you have some explanation for how doing this makes any sense at all, please share. But I think you’re basically engaging in conspiracy theory by claiming Google intentionally reduced the quality of search to drive AI adoption.
It's not that hard to synthesize how business leadership would both optimize for the present of the pre-AI era while also continually refining their strategy as AI became clearer on the horizon.
You're jumping through hoops when this really isn't that complicated or far fetched in a business sense.
It makes no sense that Google would intentionally degrade their search quality now (and even years ago) for some hypothetical future where they have replaced it with AI.
It is extremely farfetched because it would provide no present or future advantage to Google to do so. If they hypothetically wanted to intentionally degrade their search, they could always do that when they are ready for the switch to AI.
> It makes no sense that Google would intentionally degrade their search quality now (and even years ago) for some hypothetical future where they have replaced it with AI.
It literally does though.
Furthermore, even if you reject that, in practice it could be as simple as Google funneling resources from maintaining search (which is obviously a never ending game of cat-and-mouse between forces of SEO, etc) to AI prospects, which would have the same outcome: neglect leads to degradation and dysfunction, and it makes their new venture more appealing. They obviously have enough capital to play such a game in the short-term and eat whatever loss necessary during the transition.
Google is well known by now for abandoning their products in favor of what they deem to be the Next Thing.
Also, it's not like Google went on autopilot and pursued nothing in recent years. Clearly they've dedicated resources to AI, so it's not hard to believe they foresaw potential resistance to selling the concept of AI to users and took measures to funnel them into the behavior Google desired, all the while making it appear as a choice the user was making.
Google famously solved the search problem and the spam problem, and technology has only gotten more capable since then. Suggesting that blogspam etc are too difficult to defeat is a tough sell imo.