Google doesn’t try to stop you from visiting a website. It tries to answer your query directly, which may mean it’s no longer necessary to visit the website.
A more realistic scenario is someone asking, “hey, what’s 20 ounces in grams?” Then there’s a “website” that wants to invite you in and tell you all about unit conversion, and show you tables for how many tonnes are in a ton, etc. Meanwhile “Google” just says “566.99”. It started doing that sort of thing back in 2012, long before the AI boom started. Many of those info cards (like unit conversions) don’t use LLMs and are actually really handy.
Having said that, yeah, it’s devastating to websites that were free to use and ad supported and depended on traffic to survive. And, because humans are thrifty, websites that weren’t free to use mostly disappeared a long time ago. I don’t know what the solution is. But, I don’t think it’s “prevent Google from answering your question if it is capable of doing so”.
In your example, many browsers will do simple math or conversions in the address bar without AI, and google gave that same answer prior to AI with a simple conversion menu box that showed up as you said. It still does sometimes depending on the question.
More realistically it would be “How long is a Boeing 747?” Now an AI will give you a length range and offer that there are different 747 models manufactured in different years, etc.
So instead of clicking on an ad-supported “aviation info” site like you say, odds are the asker will just take the provided summary and not proceed any further, or refine the question to a specific model that again an AI will probably answer, even possibly ironically scraping the content from the very same “aviation info” site that would have received your click 5 years ago, but now google gets the view and the site doesn’t.
Google doesn’t try to stop you from visiting a website. It tries to answer your query directly, which may mean it’s no longer necessary to visit the website.
A more realistic scenario is someone asking, “hey, what’s 20 ounces in grams?” Then there’s a “website” that wants to invite you in and tell you all about unit conversion, and show you tables for how many tonnes are in a ton, etc. Meanwhile “Google” just says “566.99”. It started doing that sort of thing back in 2012, long before the AI boom started. Many of those info cards (like unit conversions) don’t use LLMs and are actually really handy.
Having said that, yeah, it’s devastating to websites that were free to use and ad supported and depended on traffic to survive. And, because humans are thrifty, websites that weren’t free to use mostly disappeared a long time ago. I don’t know what the solution is. But, I don’t think it’s “prevent Google from answering your question if it is capable of doing so”.
In your example, many browsers will do simple math or conversions in the address bar without AI, and google gave that same answer prior to AI with a simple conversion menu box that showed up as you said. It still does sometimes depending on the question.
More realistically it would be “How long is a Boeing 747?” Now an AI will give you a length range and offer that there are different 747 models manufactured in different years, etc.
So instead of clicking on an ad-supported “aviation info” site like you say, odds are the asker will just take the provided summary and not proceed any further, or refine the question to a specific model that again an AI will probably answer, even possibly ironically scraping the content from the very same “aviation info” site that would have received your click 5 years ago, but now google gets the view and the site doesn’t.