Are we approaching “Google zero”, where Google searches will use generative AI systems to summarize responses to queries, thus ending the reason for people to visit website? And if that happens what is lost?
These are common questions that have been building month over month as more advanced foundational models are built, deployed, and iterated upon. But there has been relatively little assessment in public forums around the social dimensions of making a web search. Instead, the focus has tended to be on loss of traffic and subsequent economic effects of this transition.
A 2022 paper entitled “Situating Search” identifies what a search engine does, and what it is used for, in order for the authors to argue that search that only provides specific requested information (often inaccurately) fails to account for the broader range of things that people use search for.
Specifically, when people search they:
- lookup
- learn
- investigate
When a ChatGPT or Gemini approach to search is applied, however, it limits the range of options before a user. Specifically, in binding search to conversational responses we may impair individuals from conducting search/learning in ways that expand domain knowledge or that rely on sensemaking of results to come to a given conclusion.
Page 227 of the paper has a helpful overview of the dimensions of Information Seeking Strategies (ISS), which explain the links between search and the kinds of activities in which individuals engage. Why, also, might chat-based (or other multimodal) search be a problem?
- it can come across as too authoritative
- by synthesizing data from multiple sources and masking the available range of sources, it cuts the individual’s ability to expose the broader knowledge space
- LLMs, in synthesizing text, may provide results that are not true
All of the above issues are compounded in situations where individuals have low information literacy and, thus, are challenged in their ability to recognize deficient responses from an AI-based search system.
The authors ultimately conclude with the following:
…we should be looking to build tools that help users find and make sense of information rather than tools that purport to do it all for them. We should also acknowledge that the search systems are used and will continue to be used for tasks other than simply finding an answer to a question; that there is tremendous value in information seekers exploring, stumbling, and learning through the process of querying and discovery through these systems.
As we race to upend the systems we use, today, we should avoid moving quickly and breaking things and instead opt to enhance and improve our knowledge ecosystem. There is a place for these emerging technologies but rather than bolting them onto–and into–all of our information technologies we should determine when they are or are not fit for a given purpose.
Excited Pixels 