Full Transcript for Albanese’s Barracks Backdown & The Death Of Googling

Ask Jeeves, did AI just. 00:03:18 Speaker 1: Kill the biggest search engine in the world? Across the Tasman, New Zealanders voted on Saturday, but they still don't know who won. And we might not for a while. So far, there is a gap of less than one percentage point. Talk about down to the wire. Christopher Luxon's National Party has 29.37% of the vote, and Chris Hipkin's Labor Party has 29.22%. The official result isn't expected for about three weeks, but it's likely to take even longer than that for either side to form a coalition to govern, so Kiwis might not have a new government before Christmas, and now the minor parties could decide it, The Opportunity Party looks set to enter parliament for the first time and could be the kingmaker. 00:04:13 Speaker 4: Further afield, but an equally close. 00:04:16 Speaker 1: Election, Israel's President Isaac Herzog has asked Benjamin Netanyahu's main rival, former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, to try to form the next government. Historically, no party can govern alone, so they need to form a coalition. Following last month's election, Eisencott came out as the preferred PM by most parties, so has been given 28 days to lock in a working majority. Meanwhile, Netanyahu is fighting to stay in power, has called for a unity government in which the two rivals share power. 00:04:50 Speaker 4: And if you felt chilly this weekend, you weren't alone. 00:04:54 Speaker 1: In fact, we saw some springtime snow. The Bureau of Meteorology said a weather system moved cold air from Antarctica to blasting the southeast corner of the country and causing snow to fall in parts of New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania. While snow in November is unusual, it does happen. The last time for some of those regions was in 2022. 00:05:18 Speaker 2: Thanks, Charlotte. All right, honesty time. What was the last thing you searched? 00:05:24 Speaker 1: Mine? 00:05:24 Speaker 2: Well, it was what's the weather like next weekend? I'm always wondering that. And what about where you put that question? Was it Google search or perhaps ChatGBT or Claude? Well, back in the 1950s, if you had a problem you and your colleagues couldn't solve, you didn't Google it, of course. You wrote a letter to the library and awaited their response. 00:05:46 Speaker 3: In the 1950s, that library was the search engine for the city. Companies would write letters, literal physical letters to the head librarian saying, we're trying to figure out the answer to this problem. Can someone in your team help us? 00:05:58 Speaker 2: That's Mark Sanderson. He's a professor of information retrieval at RMIT University in Melbourne. He spent his career studying search engines and how we get information. And things changed a lot when the internet was invented. Search engines started out pretty rudimentary. Think Ask Jeeves. And then they evolved. 00:06:18 Speaker 3: Web search was a huge change because it made search available to the masses and it was very usable, particularly when Google came along, it was very usable. And so people just started using search engines in a way that they had never done before. 00:06:31 Speaker 2: Over the past 30 years or so, there's always been a place on the internet where you can go and type in a few keywords and then you get access to pages that might be relevant and you can explore from there. But things are changing. The way we find information is going through its biggest change in a generation, and Google's latest results help show us how. At the end of October, Google's parent company, Alphabet, reported its numbers for July to September. The headline was huge, of course, revenue up 25% to almost 128 billion US dollars. And CEO Sundar Pichai said people are searching more than at any point in the last five years. which he puts down to AI. But search, as the revenue stream that's driven the business for so many years, had barely grown. And by analyst math, search now makes up less than half of Alphabet's revenue for the first time. So more searching, but not more money. James Gruber from Comsec's Market Update explains. 00:07:30 Speaker 5: When you or I go to search now in Google search, there's an AI summary at the top. We're not scrolling down as much. We're not clicking on some of those links as much. And that means less advertising dollars for Google's parent alphabet. You're also using potentially more of Claude and other AI directly. And that means less search as well on the likes of Google. So all of that means less ad dollars. And that search business has been one of the most spectacular businesses ever founded in the history of businesses. So it's pretty profound. And those results are starting to worry investors. 00:08:09 Speaker 2: So how exactly has the way we search changed? Google's obviously been watching the changing landscape closely. Shivani Moan is the company's Search Vice President of Data Science and User Experience Research. In a recent interview, she explained a bit about the changing nature of our queries. 00:08:27 Speaker 6: So now we're seeing that people are asking much longer, much more detailed questions. Like even in just search, we can see that the query length has increased 3x. So these aren't just that they're replacing their keyword queries with longer queries. They're asking net new types of queries that they would have never thought to ask before. 00:08:50 Speaker 2: 10 years ago, maybe you'd search three words, chicken, dinner, easy. Today, you might say, I've got two chicken thighs, half a capsicum, a toddler who only eats beige food and 20 minutes. Can you help? And Professor Sanderson has noticed himself doing this too. 00:09:05 Speaker 3: When I go to use it these days, I'm sitting there on my keyboard and I'm typing in like a long sentence. I have this problem. Last night I was trying to resolve an expenses form. I wrote like a two-sentence explanation about why I was having trouble resolving my expenses. And in the old days, I would

have just said, give me the manual for the software that I'm using. And I was thinking, why am I typing this whole sentence in? Why aren't I just typing in the keywords? And I realized that although typing in all those words was longer mentally, it was easier to just say to the system, this is my problem. Can you help me? 00:09:41 Speaker 2: And we're not just typing in longer, more complex queries. 00:09:45 Speaker 6: People are also asking questions in new and novel ways with multimodal searches and One in every six searches is multimodal. 00:09:53 Speaker 2: That means starting a search with a picture or a screenshot. For example, here's a photo of a spider in my bathroom. Is it time to panic or will I survive? And it's no longer one search and done. It's more like a conversation. that's not quite right try again okay now what about this but if ai is doing the summarizing and we're no longer clicking through to the source how do we actually trust what we're being told Google says some things people still want from the source and real humans. 00:10:21 Speaker 6: There are other moments where users want to hear a lot more from authentic human voices and so they are gravitating a lot more to podcasts. and review sites, and they want to be able to hear from the voice of the original user. 00:10:37 Speaker 3: There are some people who just accept what's written in the AI overview, and then there are others who go look at the original documents. And one of the things that's interesting about that is for the people who just read the overviews, this new searching system is a time saver. But the people who want to check, it's almost got more frustrating because you get the overview and then you've got a clink and then you go, ah, do you know what? This document doesn't really describe what's written in the overview. I need to go and do some more searching. 00:11:03 Speaker 2: So while some of us might find this new way of working really helpful... It also means that a lot of us will be missing out on some of those random tidbits along the way that might have been good to know or simply enjoyable to learn. 00:11:15 Speaker 3: If you get AI to write your essay, your school essay or your essay at university, then that is like going to the gym and getting a robot to lift weights for you. It's not really achieving the goal of getting you to write the essay. But in terms of getting a search engine to maybe help you answer some problem, I think we just want the system to tell us the answer. 00:11:38 Speaker 2: So the way we're asking for and receiving information is changing. Where does it go from here? Well, the next step very well could be that AI does the searching for you. And if you're looking for something to buy, the AI might do that for you too, with a thing called an agent. In September, Meta launched one in the US called Muse. It can browse websites, fill in forms, book travel and make purchases on your behalf. It shot to the top of Apple's App Store and Amazon has already blocked it from shopping on its site. It's not in Australia yet, but Gruber from Comsec says this is where search is heading. 00:12:14 Speaker 5: If you wanted to purchase a watch or purchase jewellery, normally you'd Google search it. I've been doing it myself. So Garmin Forerunner, it's a running watch. I searched that and you got AI summaries of some of what the prices are. You can also click on links directly to Garmin.com. directly to other stores within Australia that hold it. You have to do a fair bit of work to rummage through all of that to get exactly what you want and at the price that you want. An agent will do that all for you in a split second if you put in the right prompts. 00:12:46 Speaker 2: The real utility of it will be in comparing things that can be really complex to do, like flights or insurance. All those times when you've got 10 tabs open at once and you start to sweat. But who actually comes out ahead in this new age? 00:13:00 Speaker 5: That's the efficiency that's taking place. And this is kind of the next evolution, the next step that can save a lot of time. It's going to be interesting whether it's more of a benefit to consumers versus companies, because companies have benefited enormously from the internet and those changes, including the search business we were talking about. Whether consumers benefit more than companies now is going to be a really interesting question going forwards. 00:13:27 Speaker 2: So in many people's lifetimes, we've gone from writing to a library for information and waiting maybe weeks for a response to then simple online search and now a new form of flowing conversation with search engines and LLMs and soon agents. So is the old way of searching gone for good? 00:13:45 Speaker 3: I think keyword search is on its last legs. We used to go to libraries and use the Dewey Decimal System. I guess it's still there, but it's not something we learn or use. I think we're really at the end of this era of keyword search. And my suspicion is that the company Google will keep going. I think it's actually managing to embrace AI quite successfully. So Google will keep going. But the traditional Google search that we all grew up with, I think it's gone. 00:14:11 Speaker 2: That's all for now. If you have a topic you'd like us to discuss, our inbox is always open. We're at thequickie at mamamia.com.au. And make sure to rate and review us in your favourite podcast app. It helps other people find us. 00:14:28 Speaker 1: Mamamia acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which we have recorded this podcast.