May 24
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Google announced a series of sudden changes that are coming, some as soon as they were unveiled, at Tuesday’s Google I/O conference held in Mountain View CA. Collected under an umbrella known as Gemini, these changes are more about using artificial intelligence to solidify Google’s role as a lifestyle ecosystem provider for its billions of users than they are about search. Tuesday’s announcements complete a fundamental change in the utilization of Google’s original mission statement, “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”, in which Google is going to focus on the useful part as much or more than it is on the accessible bit. For me, the most important part of yesterday’s stage show seems to have gone unnoticed and unmentioned. Google stopped trying to be a general search engine when it caught its latest whiff of its long time holy grail, complete data-personalization. Google isn’t about the world’s information anymore. As of today, it’s all about yours.
What is data?
Two days ago, data was a term describing a bucket of information about something or somethings. Today, at least in the context of Google’s emerging personal ecosystem, data is a term synonymous with oil. Data is everything and in a digital world of symmetry and motion, all data must be described, annotated, and tagged so it is instantly and consistently easy to understand. Data has always been Google’s lifeblood and securing, sorting, and serving it to an information hungry world has always been how Google and other search engines operate. Gemini is different in that it uses several AI processes to make that data useful in ways that are both brilliant and baffling at the same time.
The brilliant parts should be obvious to anyone with a curious mind. If you can think of it and describe it, there’s a fair chance a Gemini infused set of tools can reproduce it. If the string of artists, writers, developers, department heads, and C-level hype-o-matic types who introduced and explained each subset of capabilities are to be believed, we’re talking about everything from written words to mathematical problem solving to complex artistic compositions and more. Gemini is really freaking awesome and it will eliminate a lot of the drudge work that goes into a lot of our professional and personal processes. Unfortunately, to do so it will also eliminate a lot of the work described as drudgery by people who do it to pay their rent, debts, and bills.
And that, of course, is where we find the baffling part. Once you go beyond the wonders of the natural world, and I need to assure you we are so far beyond that it’s virtually indescribable to everyone except Minecraft enthusiasts, all data is created by people. Nearly everything Gemini previously ever trained on was made by humans. As of yesterday, we very honestly don’t know if something is truly authentic, authentic but augmented (ala autotune), or entirely artificial artistry. Moreover, when creative people start using the vast array of time bending tools made available, and realize how staggeringly powerful the new tools are (even for lower cost applications), let’s say it’ll be increasingly hard to find creative works that weren’t somehow enhanced or even entirely performed by AI. At this point I’d like to stop so I can ask you a terrible question. “Have you ever watched a snake destroy itself by swallowing its own tail?”
Think about the snake for a few minutes because it’s an easily made metaphor when one understands how most AI models work. The thing is, Gemini is more than most AI models. Gemini uses every connective device in Alphabet’s soup to understand the wants, needs, and capacities of every one of its billions of users. Consider the Android device that runs the Chrome browser many readers will view this article on. That device knows so much more about you than you might be comfortable considering but you should. Right now, because, data. Data is everything and, as you well know, you yourself are everything, and that means you are data. Yummmmmm.
There’s probably not a better time to tell you this but you need to know that privacy is dead. Really really dead. It’s not sort of being abused by nice but mildly abusive people. It is dead. Doornailed, coffinbound, six feet under a pile of AI driven advertising, capital D dead. This is an important point to get past if you want to live in Star Trek. It’s also an important point to understand if you’re a business because, now more than ever, business is about deeply personal relationships and Gemini is, if anything, deeply personal. If you have a problem with this, ummm, you’re absolutely right in every one of your fears including the ones that are probably imaginary because generative AI is kinda like that. Let me tell you a short story about dominance. I promise it’ll have a snappy ending.
Near the beginning of the Internet age, sometime around 1994 or 95, we worried about who controlled the operating system of personal computers because they who control the desktop control the overall experience. Microsoft had made its play for world dominance over a decade earlier by leasing rather than reselling the Disc-based Operating System (DOS) to IBM and building Windows on top of it to make DOS easily usable on every PC and knockoff evermore. Once MSDOS controlled the operating systems of what was then about 90% of the desktop computer market, it could introduce suites of its own products directly on the desktop and shun those of its competitors to the process of getting discovered. Microsoft still uses that heft in many ways, such as ChatGPTs reliance on the Edge browser but they are far more subtle after years of DOJ anti-trust involvement. To be clear, years of DOJ anti-trust involvement is likely in Google’s future as well but the keywords to these cases are often spelled in years so it’s unlikely this wave of change is going to be altered by the courts until after it’s taken place.
The important point to remember here is how much data Google is and has been able to collect about its individual users. One thing AI is really good at is analysing staggeringly large amounts of data and summarizing it succinctly so it is understandable and usable. You are that data. Your location and your shopping list and your search history and your purchase details and your banking information and your emails and the gamut of things you do while connected in the Alphabetverse provides that data. Since I wrote about it very recently, the fact that I personally enjoy old sharp cheddar cheese on stone-milled wheat crackers while drinking tea imported from India at my business address is 100% accurately part of that data, as is the location of the store I bought these lunch items at, and there’s not a thing I can do about it beyond opting out of the way I’ve learned to live modern life. After a decade and a half of living in and among the wilds of social media, I’m willing to bet on Star Trek but only because that privacy bubble was already past half burst and I at least want a better future from it but, given the timeline we live in, it is more likely we’ll become data-serfs than StarFleet ensigns. How we live and work with information is how we understand and interpret reality so the coming months are perhaps among the most important times in human history. No pressure eh?
So, let’s look at how Gemini is going to help us better understand, interpret, and work with information. Starting today throughout the United States and rolling out to over 200 countries by year’s end, AI Overviews will summarize certain types of search results based on the complexity of query and if Google thinks Gemini will provide a better answer than the traditional results sets might. The summary generated might be six or seven paragraphs long and be broken up with carousel-like sets of links to pages or products Gemini thinks would augment the user’s personal understanding or personal purchase journey. Those links might not appear to relate directly to text used in the summary which will be incredibly challenging and confusing for search marketers used to thinking in terms of keyword rankings. The Gemini twist to the generated result sets is that Gemini will perform secondary searches based on what it believes is the intention of a user’s search to produce references that might better fit what it has deduced the user actually wanted. This is why one might see results that would fall far below the traditional top10 placements surface in AI generative results.
MultiStep Reasoning
Intention is an interesting thing. Gemini uses multistep reasoning to put together numerous elements it knows about an individual or gets from the way they structured their search query. In an example used yesterday at Google I/O, Liz Reid, head of Google Search, outlined her search for a popular yoga studio on her daily commute route offering a discount for new members that had classes that fit with her children’s school schedules. By entering a query that incorporated each need, a results set which included reviews, maps, well written descriptions of classes offered by different studios, along with business and pricing information was generated. The more complex the query, the greater the number of ways Gemini tries to find information to satisfy it, which is why everything is, by the necessity of being noticed, going to be reflected as data.
Personal Feeding and Scheduling
There is so much information out there and over the years, Google has ridden webmasters to use structured data like schema markup and business owners to fill in the various fields in Google Business Profiles in order to digitally describe information relating to pretty much anything. Remembering our earlier example of looking for a yoga studio that fits within a number of location and time based parameters, imagine the possibilities of planning a nutritional schedule based around your work, chore, exercise and recreation times. You could be in completely different parts of your community at the same hour on different days yet still know where to purchase a nutritious meal, or where to buy ingredients to make one when you get home, if that fits your schedule. All that information is available across dozens of local websites and in the information your own Googleverse devices provide. The implication left on stage was, if Gemini can plan meals around extremely complex schedules and locations, perhaps it can organize other parts of our lives as well. Provided enough information by Google users and from the websites and apps representing local organizations, business, and institutions, perhaps it can.
The Future of Web Services
For website owners and the businesses who provide web development services the future is going to be busy. There is a lot we can now do that we couldn’t do before and a lot more we can do with tools that will speed various development processes exponentially. Gemini will be able to help develop highly functional apps, assist developers in creating complicated code and problem solving, write highly credible first drafts of critical web copy, and perform thousands of tasks that would take tens of thousands of human hours to complete. It should be noted that artificial intelligence, while awfully smart, isn’t actually creative. While it can do incredibly complicated things and understands virtually any process outlined in a world full of training materials, AI is always repeating the most logical pattern based on what could be innumerable data inputs. AI can reduce the time it takes to do very big things by being able to quickly cope with vast oceans of information. It can recognize and replicate and even intuit next steps in virtually any process as easily as it can figure out which words most logically follow to form a sentence similar to this one.
The future of web services is doing more with stronger tools. The function of web sites is likely to change but it’s hard to see their role of providing information to web users going away any time soon. New tools will make it easier for many business owners to provide web services to their own businesses, however, as all business owners know, specialists tend to achieve far better outcomes than DIY projects do. Web service specialists will need to incorporate AI tools into their workspaces in order to keep up with increased levels of client wants and needs. The bottom line is, someone needs to know how all this stuff works and, as seemingly intelligent as artificial intelligence is, AI is not a business owner and can not possess the entrepreneurial vision or passion to make a business succeed. The future of many web service providers is probably strong but the learning curve of knowledge needed to stay relevant has increased exponentially.
Ultimately, there might not be as many futures in web services as many current developer jobs might go the way of the file clerk and of the dodos before them. That said, there is an equal chance that with the extended powers of creativity and analysis available, new fields requiring web service skill sets will emerge. History tends to prove innovation creates new fields of employment even as it cuts like a knife through others.
One thing we do know for certain is that a new arms race has opened between Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Adobe, and a few other big houses in the digital space. AI is everywhere and data is everything and the things that will rock your world moving forward will be, in large part, cultivated from the worlds you create in your daily interactions within and outside of the Googleverse. It’s not entirely Star Trek’s utopia yet it’s not entirely dystopian either. Let’s hope the various tech houses define this race by how AI can help humanity rather than how AI can capitalize on humanity’s needs. The future, as we once knew it, is now far behind us. Let’s hope the future in front of us is friendly.
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Jim Hedger
Jim Hedger is an organic SEO and digital marketing specialist. Jim has been involved in the online marketing industry since 1998 and a SEO since 1999. Best known as a broadcaster, interviewer, content writer and search industry commentator, Jim is a frequent conference speaker and organizer. He hosts the search focused radio show Webcology on WebmasterRadio.FM and is a WebmasterRadio.FM conference interviewer. Jim brings a wealth of knowledge, experience, passion and creative thinking to each project. Preferring a teamwork approach, Jim strives to inform and train his clients and their staff to run and maintain their own search and social media efforts.
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