Google’s new AI Overviews feature has garnered a lot of backlash throughout the tech community. Well, the backlash continues. The CEO of Perplexity, Aravind Srinivas, bashed Google over its search business and its business practices.
To catch you up, Google recently launched AI Overviews to the public. If you don’t know what this feature is, you may recognize it by its previous name Google SGE (search generative experience). It’s a feature that will give you artificially generated overviews when you do a Google search. If you do a search for how to get more iron in your diet, rather than getting search results containing websites to tell you, Google will just give you the explanation.
Obviously, this caused outrage amongst the tech community and particularly amongst journalists. If you want to learn how to disable AI Overviews, it’s pretty simple. You can either install the Hide Google AI Overviews Chrome extension or read How To Disable AI Overviews.
Perplexity CEO bashes Google for its search business
Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of Perplexity, recently spoke to Axios. During the interview, he spoke pretty viciously about Google’s business practices as they pertain to Search.
In the statement, Srinivas said, “In a world where everyone gets answers and doesn’t have to click on links, the biggest loser is Google,”. This is referring to the business practice of prioritizing AI-generated results rather than leading users to websites. This will greatly reduce the ad revenue that both Google and the websites will receive. So, it seems that Google could possibly shoot itself in the foot with this feature.
Undoubtedly, AI Overviews cost Google billions of dollars in research and development. So, if it hinders its own main source of income, the company could see challenges ahead.
Srinivas talked about how Google seems to prioritize serving sponsored results over organic results. Whenever you search on Google, (well, before AI Overviews), you will typically see sponsored search results above organic search results. This shows a “conflict between serving the user and serving the advertiser.” in Srinivas’ eyes.
So, it’s obvious that Google is in a bit of a pinch right now with its business model. Search is its biggest source of revenue, but its own AI technology seems to be putting it at risk. As the company continues to precipitate money over its AI efforts, it’s unclear if it is doing more harm than good.
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