Online publishers worry that Google's AI search will free content and harm website traffic revenue

News on May 12th, on Wednesday, local time, Google announced that it would introduce generative artificial intelligence into its search engine. This may be one of the biggest changes in the history of Google’s search engine. one. There is widespread concern among online publishers that Google's new searches could impact traffic to their sites.

At the annual developer conference, Google announced that it will use artificial intelligence models to integrate and summarize information from all over the Internet. Google said that this so-called generative search experience product can be more Good responses come from users’ search queries.

Google will show some users AI-generated text paragraphs and prioritize several relevant links on the search results page, instead of the "ten blue links" that Google search results typically display.

The new AI-powered Google search is being tested with select users and is not yet widely available. However, many online publishers have begun to worry that if this becomes Google's default way of displaying search results, more users will stay on Google's website, which may bring less traffic to their websites and affect online publishing. business income.

The controversy also highlights the long-standing tension between Google and the sites it indexes, a situation that has undoubtedly been exacerbated by the emergence of new artificial intelligence tools. Online publishers have long worried that Google would remix snippets of content from their sites on its own, but now Google is apparently using advanced machine learning models to "train" artificial intelligence to produce similar text and responsive results.

Rutledge Daugette, CEO of TechRaptor, a website that focuses on gaming news and review content, said that Google’s move did not take into account the interests of online publishers at all, and Google’s artificial intelligence search It is equivalent to plagiarizing website content.

"Their focus is zero-click search, using high-quality content that online publishers and writers have spent time and effort creating; unlike users who may click on a website, this does not offer online publishers and writers "So far, artificial intelligence has been rapidly reusing other people's information without any benefit to the content owner. In the case of Google specifically, the chatbot Bard will not even provide the information used." Sources of information.”

Luther Lowe, Yelp’s director of public policy, has long been critical of Google’s search policies. He said the updates to Google Search were part of a decades-long strategy to keep users on Google sites longer rather than directing them to the site where the information was originally provided.

Lowe said in an interview: "The exclusivity created by Google's introduction of the ChatGPT clone into the search field is the final chapter of bloodletting for the entire network."

According to close tracking of Google search engine Change news site Search Engine Land revealed that so far in tests, AI-generated content has been shown above organic search results (links to free listings that are relevant and valuable to the search). There have been previous reports that Google plans to redesign its search results page to promote artificial intelligence-generated content.

Based on testing of the generative search experience, AI-generated content will be prioritized in a green box at the top of the Google search results page, with three boxes on the right showing relevant website links. In the first example about Google search results, the titles of information from three websites were not displayed in full.

Google said the information was not scraped from the website and was used only to verify the link. Search Engine Land says the generative search experience is an improvement and a "healthier" way to link compared to Google's Bard chatbot, which rarely links directly to web publishers' sites.

Some online publishers are wondering whether they can prevent artificial intelligence companies such as Google from scraping content on their websites to train artificial intelligence models. Artificial intelligence companies such as Stable Diffusion have faced lawsuits from data owners, but there is still no clear conclusion on how to define the behavior of artificial intelligence crawling network data. Other companies, such as Reddit, began announcing plans to charge for access to their data.

IAC owns multiple websites such as All Recipe, People Magazine and Daily Beast. The company's chairman, Barry Diller, is a leading figure in the publishing industry. "If all the information in the world could be sucked into this cauldron and repackaged into declarative sentences in a so-called chat function, you could have as much of it as you want," he told a conference last month. , then there would be no publishing industry, because this is impossible.”

Diller continued: "All you have to do is get the industry to agree that unless you can come up with a system that allows online publishers to get paid channels, you can't steal our content." He said Google will face this question.

Diller said that he believes that online publishers can sue artificial intelligence companies under copyright law and that the scope of restrictions on "fair use" needs to be redefined. It was reported on Wednesday that a group of online publisher executives led by Diller said, "If necessary, we will change the copyright law."

The main challenge facing online publishers is how to determine what content on their sites of content is being used by artificial intelligence. Google did not disclose the training source of PaLM 2, the large language model behind the generative search experience. Doggett said that although he has seen examples of content from other websites being rewritten without attribution on the chatbot Bard, it is difficult to tell whether the information comes from a specific website without a direct link to the source.

Google did not comment. “PaLM 2 was trained on vast amounts of publicly available data from the internet, and we clearly take the health of the web ecosystem seriously,” Zoubin Ghahramani, Google’s vice president of research, said in a media briefing earlier this week. "Ensuring a healthy ecosystem is indeed part of how we think about how to develop products, and creators are part of this thriving ecosystem," Docter said at the meeting. Google's move will allow independent networks to Publishers are in a tough spot.

"I think it's really frustrating for our industry when a lot of our colleagues are laid off and we have to worry about our hard work being plagiarized," Doggett said. "It's wrong."

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