Google, a response engine search engine

The provision of responses written from the information found on the Internet broken with the historic model of search engines displaying links pointing to Internet pages. A questioning of the digital economy and access to information.

Since its launch in September 1998, Google has established itself in the Western world as the first search engine on the Internet. In less than three decades, Google is indeed part of our daily life to the point of having become in French a verb, Googleindicating that you have looked for information about someone or something.

Since its creation, Google has structured Internet access by providing Internet users with links pointing to the pages in principle containing the elements sought. This is what founded its economic model and its prosperity: at the end of 2024, the marketing of research services represented 75 % of Google’s advertising revenues. For the record, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, achieved $ 350 billion in turnover in 2024.

Consumer uses are constantly evolving. In the same way that they joined the sober and white interface of Google, abandoning in the late 1990s the internet portals that were inspired by magazine blankets, with many sections, to attract the eye of the Internet user.

Today, it is the format offered by artificial intelligence services like Chatgpt or Mistral which is acclaimed by Internet users and mobile users. We went from a search engine to a response engine. That is to say that algorithms offer versions written from the data they have collected on the Internet, then reformulated without you visiting the sites containing these elements of response to your request.

This form of presentation therefore allows access directly to a response synthesized from elements present on different sites. But that asks several questions.

On the one hand, you will transfer to artificial intelligence, with settings that you ignore, the necessarily elliptical collection and summary that is offered to you. A bit as if you only read press reviews and give up reading a full newspaper.

Then, this diverts visitors from the initial sites containing the information that interests Internet users and mobile users. And therefore prevents any direct relationship between these transmitters and these users. Unlike the classic search engine which precisely designates the original pages containing the required elements.

It is therefore a massive and very sudden weakening of the economic model of many companies, which thus lose contact with their customers or prospects. Ditto for free sites paid by the advertising audience. They find themselves in the position of the merchant whose usual flow of visitors we would have diverted, who also can become buyers in the case of merchant sites.

We have a very concrete example with a new feature of Google entitled “Ai Overviews” Or “seen IA” in French and launched in the United States in May 2024. It has just been deployed in 200 countries, but not yet in France, especially for legal reasons. It in fact dispens Internet users to go to the sites that host the information that made it possible to formulate the answer.

These automatic texts relate to all subjects: the topical themes drawn from media sites but also for example in the fields of health or travel by punctuating the pages of companies on the market concerned. With frequentation reductions for the sites in question. To the point of worrying their publishers who see a part of the audience, and therefore of turnover, escape them.

Google explains for its part that people who go beyond the summary answer and click on the links mentioned as sources are really interested readers, and would therefore constitute a monetitable audience in better conditions. Because more qualified than the average visitor who is just curious.

And this provision of information in a written form would give the user more satisfaction. Inciting him to formulate more queries.

An additional illustration of the mechanics of the attention economy which bases more than ever the financing of digital services. And the need for sites of sites not to depend too much on a powerful actor, like Google, for their relations with their audiences. This is the reason why you are more and more offered to register for dedicated applications, in order to establish a direct relationship and without intermediary with the service you appreciate.