Plan would represent a first for what has been a completely ad-funded search engine.
Google might start charging for access to search results that use generative artificial intelligence tools. That's according to a new Financial Times report citing "three people with knowledge of [Google's] plans."
Charging for any part of the search engine at the core of its business would be a first for Google, which has funded its search product solely with ads since 2000. But it's far from the first time Google would charge for AI enhancements in general; the "AI Premium" tier of a Google One subscription costs $10 more per month than a standard "Premium" plan, for instance, while "Gemini Business" adds $20 a month to a standard Google Workspace subscription.
Hopefully this will backfire and just push people to use alternative search engines. Unlike YouTube and other subscription services, Google Search doesn’t have any exclusive rights to content.
It will. 5, maybe 8 years ago, google mighta gotten this one over on us, but it's way too late. I don't even trust google search results anymore, haven't used it to look up something in over a year. Maps, sure. Web search? Nahp.
It's what basically every other AI tool wants to do, because building and operating LLM's at this scale is horrifically expensive.
So let them do it. Those that want these tools will pay, and the 99.999% of people that don't give a fuck about AI can just continue as normal.
Hell, if Google want to deshitify their search by removing the ML nonsense they've been loading into it for the last decade or so, even better! Let me pay for that too, and I'll pay them exactly nothing.
Once upon a time, in the vast land of Internet, there was a magical library called Web. The library had many librarians, but a wise old owl by the name of Google was the most popular one. Everyone in the kingdom of knowledge loved him. People asked him questions, and Google gave them the answers. Life was good.
However, in the dark corners of the Internet, in the Swamps of Bottomless Greed, there lurked an evil litch queen Seo. She only wanted to watch the world burn, and so she cast an evil curse on Google. The curse of Seo made Google give completely wrong answer. As chaos, ignorance and lies spread cross the land, queen Seo laughed in her castle.
I think this lets Google off the hook. I think Google wanted to be the only librarian because Google was jealous of the other librarians, so they went to the swamp of greed and negotiated with the evil queen.
Google might start charging for access to search results that use generative artificial intelligence tools.
While those paid products offer access to Google's high-end "Gemini Advanced" AI model, Google also offers free access to its less performant, plain "Gemini" model without any kind of paid subscription.
"SGE never feels like a useful addition to Google Search," Ars' Ron Amadeo wrote last month.
Regardless, the current tech industry mania surrounding anything and everything related to generative AI may make Google feel it has to integrate the technology into some sort of "premium" search product sooner rather than later.
Last month, the company announced it was redoubling its efforts to limit the appearance of "spammy, low-quality content"—much of it generated by AI chatbots—in its search results.
In February, Google shut down the image generation features of its Gemini AI model after the service was found inserting historically inaccurate examples of racial diversity into some of its prompt responses.
The original article contains 323 words, the summary contains 156 words. Saved 52%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
The largest number in the world isn't big enough to describe the % chance they double dip. Ironically I think the 2nd largest numbers are called googols, after grahams number, IIRC.