> If users expect Google Bard to proclaim the one right answer, Google has demonstrated that it is sufficiently incentivised to present its own high margin solution as the best one.
I’m confused. If I’m using Bard to get one right so sorry answer from a Google search, how are they making any money from their ads? What is the high margin solution tied to Google Bard?
I'm going to take Amazon BuyBox competition as an analogy here. One of the factors that helps merchants win the Amazon BuyBox is high transaction velocity. However, the more popular the product (i.e. the more merchant substitutes available), the more likely it is that the merchant will have to pay very high advertising fees to stay on top of search results on Amazon and hence drive transaction velocity. There is a demonstrated link between BuyBox placement and ad spend.
I expect Google is similarly placed and incentivised to tie the default answer on Bard with publishers who invest more in ad spend. Amazon doesn't explicitly tie the two (only doing it loosely through transaction velocity) but in a competitive market, you need to outbid competitors for visibility and Google already provides the mechanisms for that (e.g. allowing Monday.com to bid on the keyword 'asana').
Google has already moved away from providing the best answers to providing a mix of (1) the best answers, (2) Google's own properties as answers, and (3) the most monetizable answers.
On monetizability, ad costs are based on ad quality (a measure of relevance) so there is some counter-balancing in the sense that the lower the ad quality, the higher the publisher ad budget will need to be.
So... your argument is predicated on users *believing* Bard has the One Right Answer, even though they’ve totally sold out? That doesn’t seem sustainable...
Really? It's worked for Google now for more than 16 years. Users continue to overwhelmingly use Google and 'believe' it is the better search engine compared to Bing. Arguably, there is sufficient evidence to show that Google has sold out a lot more and that the quality of search results on Bing isn't poor enough to justify the market share.
As Amazon demonstrates, tying can enable a seemingly relevant provider with a higher ad budget to rank higher than the most relevant provider without an ad budget.
The device makers will own the top-level "personal" companion due to bare-metal access to immediate user data and interactions, as well as interconnected family and household devices secured in-part by the hardware. These will know your voice, fingerprint, and face signatures, your health vitals, your location, and so on. It is *this* companion you will most (only?) truly trust, and so it is this companion that will act as the gateway and liaison to all other branded top-level agents. This companion will translate content from lower-level agents to be linguistically, contextually, and tonally translated and tuned for you, itself tuned by your behavior, responses, interactions, and -- of course -- direct tuning directives.
Maybe it's still Apple vs. Alphabet, or others. But it will be the "things" we literally hold most dear to us -- the actual hardware we use to interact with the digital world -- that retains that most precious relationship.
Maybe Perplexity (and its deep-pocketed investors) can take down Google. I can see how its technology can be used in various, small LLM models to solve a vertical need.
> If users expect Google Bard to proclaim the one right answer, Google has demonstrated that it is sufficiently incentivised to present its own high margin solution as the best one.
I’m confused. If I’m using Bard to get one right so sorry answer from a Google search, how are they making any money from their ads? What is the high margin solution tied to Google Bard?
I'm going to take Amazon BuyBox competition as an analogy here. One of the factors that helps merchants win the Amazon BuyBox is high transaction velocity. However, the more popular the product (i.e. the more merchant substitutes available), the more likely it is that the merchant will have to pay very high advertising fees to stay on top of search results on Amazon and hence drive transaction velocity. There is a demonstrated link between BuyBox placement and ad spend.
I expect Google is similarly placed and incentivised to tie the default answer on Bard with publishers who invest more in ad spend. Amazon doesn't explicitly tie the two (only doing it loosely through transaction velocity) but in a competitive market, you need to outbid competitors for visibility and Google already provides the mechanisms for that (e.g. allowing Monday.com to bid on the keyword 'asana').
That seems self-defeating. If Bard provides “the best answer money can buy”, then it is no longer the One Right Answer.
Google has already moved away from providing the best answers to providing a mix of (1) the best answers, (2) Google's own properties as answers, and (3) the most monetizable answers.
On monetizability, ad costs are based on ad quality (a measure of relevance) so there is some counter-balancing in the sense that the lower the ad quality, the higher the publisher ad budget will need to be.
So... your argument is predicated on users *believing* Bard has the One Right Answer, even though they’ve totally sold out? That doesn’t seem sustainable...
Really? It's worked for Google now for more than 16 years. Users continue to overwhelmingly use Google and 'believe' it is the better search engine compared to Bing. Arguably, there is sufficient evidence to show that Google has sold out a lot more and that the quality of search results on Bing isn't poor enough to justify the market share.
As Amazon demonstrates, tying can enable a seemingly relevant provider with a higher ad budget to rank higher than the most relevant provider without an ad budget.
Yeah, for search where people can (and do) choose between the ads and the “real” results. Is Google going to label Bard as a “sponsored” result?
The device makers will own the top-level "personal" companion due to bare-metal access to immediate user data and interactions, as well as interconnected family and household devices secured in-part by the hardware. These will know your voice, fingerprint, and face signatures, your health vitals, your location, and so on. It is *this* companion you will most (only?) truly trust, and so it is this companion that will act as the gateway and liaison to all other branded top-level agents. This companion will translate content from lower-level agents to be linguistically, contextually, and tonally translated and tuned for you, itself tuned by your behavior, responses, interactions, and -- of course -- direct tuning directives.
Maybe it's still Apple vs. Alphabet, or others. But it will be the "things" we literally hold most dear to us -- the actual hardware we use to interact with the digital world -- that retains that most precious relationship.
Maybe Perplexity (and its deep-pocketed investors) can take down Google. I can see how its technology can be used in various, small LLM models to solve a vertical need.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/01/technology/perplexity-search-ai-google.html