The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 17 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Medium Loses 100 Google Clicks for Every One Click From Google Gemini
“I would estimate that we lose about a hundred clicks from traditional Google search for every one click we get back from a Gemini summary.”
Fox claims overall Google Search referral traffic to the web remains stable
“If you look holistically ah, traffic to the web from search has been stable over time. There's lots of reports of large decreases. There may, you know, at any given point in time, there are sites that do well. There are sites that, that, that struggle. But if …”
Siegler: Tying Gemini's crawler to Search gives Google massive content negotiation leverage
“Google's crawler is also tied to Google search. And so if you're turning off the crawler for Gemini you're potentially turning off Google search, which basically no one is willing to do at this point. And gives Google, you know, a huge leverage point. In, in a…”
Lemoine: LaMDA 2 was built to connect every Google AI backend
“So Lambda two, the most recent incarnation of the system, it really is Every Google AI all plugged into each other. The chatbot system is just the language center for a much, much larger AI. It has access to every Google AI system as a back end. So Lambda is G…”
Fox: Generative AI fuels Google growth by expanding what users ask
“Generative AI has been in a lot of ways, a fuel for growth as users realize they can ask more questions they can bring more questions to search.”
Fox: Google Search's future is unlikely to be an emotional AI companion
“I think it's unlikely that, that that the future of search is, Is sort of a companion that you're sort of building maybe emotion, you know, sort of an emotional relationship with.”
Kurian: Google Search, Cloud, and YouTube share the same inference stack
“And one benefit we have at Google is all our services, whether that's search or us or YouTube, this inferencing of the same stack and same model series. So the model learns very quickly from all that reinforcement learning feedback and gets better and better.”
Roy: Perplexity AI's clear format makes it the biggest traditional search competitor
“Perplexity is when I'm watching a movie, a sports game of any sort, like, it just is so good in just giving you quick information in a really nice format with Additional links to keep exploring in questions that I think for that, like, and which makes me think…”
Reid: AI Overviews synthesize multiple perspectives better than traditional single links
“I think that's one of the nice things about AI overviews is that you know, it's great that you have all of these different web results, but to the extent that the web results gave different perspective, people might've only clicked on one. And sort of assume t…”
Fox: Overall Google Search query volume continues to grow year-over-year
“Queries continue to grow and we've shared that on a year-on-year basis, queries are growing.”
Fox predicts agentic search capabilities are the future of Google
“So if you look at something like agentic, right, this is a it's clear that users want to get things done in search, right? They, if you're looking for a hotel, you ultimately want to go book that hotel. If you're looking for a product, you ultimately want to g…”
Reid: Search volume is constrained by friction, not a lack of curiosity
“Whether or not somebody asks a question isn't just a question about whether or not they had a question. It's whether or not it was worth their time. Right. And so people do that question, right? You were curious about the flower, but if you had to figure out h…”
Roy: I Almost Never Start a Search on Google Anymore
“I almost never use Google search now. I really almost never start a search on Google.”
Nemade: BERT release triggered Google-wide rush to adopt transformers
“I think one thing that I remember specifically was the Transformers paper paper came out, but I think it started making a lot of noise when BERT was out. Like when people started seeing what BERT could essentially do. That was kind of Like a switch that went o…”
Kantrowitz: Hundreds of Google Search engineers were reassigned to Google DeepMind
“Just one example I got from the story, hundreds of engineers from search, which is the most important product. At Google, which is responsible for more than half the revenue. Hundreds of engineers went from search to Google DeepMind just to, you know, give you…”
Reid: Google Search is testing a Daily Digest and AI audio podcasts
“Within Discover, we've been playing around with Daily Digest, seeing, okay, you get in the morning once, can you understand what some of the different stories are? We have a lab where we're experimenting with, if you come to search and you issue a query for th…”
Reid splits her own queries evenly between AI mode and main search
“They're split. They're split pretty strongly. I don't know if it's 40, 60, 6040, but pretty down. It depends on, on the types of questions, right? Right now, if I'm trying to find a restaurant to eat, I still find main search more effective for a lot of those …”