If they can’t even come up with a good, useful idea to showcase their product, I can’t believe it’s worth it to begin with.
The first two iteration of this were AMP and Instant Answers, the third one is AI Overview. AI Overview should not be seen in isolation, but as a part of the pattern. If it weren't for it, Google would double down on some other method of reaching the same goal.
This one will end up the same way the other two did: there's gonna be a vocal minority that's gonna consider it unfair and a web killer, the vast majority of users won't have an opinion, Google will not care, "the web" will play along, those early adopters are temporarily gonna have an advantage in this "new age" and some will die in the process, but the vast majority is gonna continue on as if nothing happened.
It's also not gonna be the final iteration of this process because shiny new things sound better to investors than marginal improvements, so X years from now AI Overview is gonna be seen as something "old-fashioned", Google Search will pivot once again, and the rest of the web will follow to keep Google happy.
They're here, they don't care how they get from point A to point B, the tech used to achieve that result is completely irrelevant to them. AI? Great. Not AI such as the Instant Answers era? Also great. Average Joe does not spend his time thinking about the economics of the web.
But you shouldn't confuse them finding "AI" useful now with them being attached to it long term. It's a hip new tool now, but the novelty will fade and Google will have to re-invent themselves all over again. If anything, they kinda screwed themselves over by calling this "AI". AI is supposed to be something within reach, but always some years away. By wasting that term for the current era, it's gonna suck so hard to think of a new marketing term that's gonna be seen as an improvement in comparison to the term "AI".
Of course, it does not destroy Google's income ... and it destroys the promise Google made long ago, which is to never keep users on Google platforms.
Oh and to add insult to injury, want to bet Opal will force app developers into what you probably never even imaged would happen on the web? Pay-per-view. Not for a video. For a website/app.
Neithet do any teams at Google, including the search teams. Google is an ad company with 80% of its revenue coming from ads. They couldn't give two shits about the health of the web.
The man who killed Google search was a minor hit when it was published: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
As for Google, what I wrote was literally spelled out in their own emails uncovered in court proceedings.
I hate to break it to you bud, but the full-page ads never went away - they just look like content now. You know why you need to scroll for 9 pages to see the ingredients to a recipe?
Google created the pageview driven business model that incentivized the internet to be filled with hostile UX, low-quality lists of paged content, affiliate spam, etc.
The amount of data on the web crossed the threshold of organic discoverability some time before the AI boom started. AI makes it go from really bad to really, really bad (99% to 99.99%). As far as I am concerned it doesn't change anything.
The same mechanisms to find good content would work today as well - following humans and networks.
Thanks for having me click through 5 screens including giving access to Google Drive to tell me that in the end.
On https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-3-flash/ , the paragraph that starts with:
"Or you can quickly build fun, useful apps from scratch using your voice without prior coding knowledge."
They'll just see whats popular and then clone, launch and instantly own verticals.
It's over for the little SaaS guys.
They have all the potential but have lost direction years ago.
I think they will stay relevant but not dominant, much like the case of Google meet.
It's common business practice to set up internal innovation competitions, and blend the best.
And even if they were, which they aren't, are you sure it's a "common business practice"? How many companies can afford that.
I’ve never thought of Google as having some clear direction short of having dominated with the pagerank search.
It reminds me of people who invented a thing that is ubiquitous and therefore just sits there printing money all their life, but basically every single other thing they’ve done since then has been at abysmal returns on capital (ie, where they would have been better off just not doing anything and putting it in the money market… their contribution was extremely negative), while they delude themselves into what wonderful success they’ve been because the one-shot invention keeps printing money.
One exception might be YouTube, but if I recall the story correctly, Google was going to shut it down too when one guy (I don’t recall now) made a proposal and single-handedly turned it into the powerhouse it now is. But that’s just dumb luck on Google’s part. That guy could have also just as well have been somewhere else at that pivotal point and Google would have killed off YouTube like it has killed off so many other projects because it lacks the actual competence to follow through with things… everything always remains with a sense of being half-baked.
That reminds me of a thing I stumbled upon a while ago now, that technically speaking several of Google’s core offerings are still designated as Beta projects behind the scenes. I’m not sure why exactly, but even if it’s just an oversight of background clutter, that seems symbolic of Google; the disheveled, disorganized, cluttered personality that has not resolved loose ends smothered in decades of other loose ends.
Claude is still used but only in IDEs for coding, I don't ask it general questions anymore.
I use Gemma as a developer for basic on-device LLM tasks such as structured JSON output.
The image quality was great, but when I ask a woodworker for a table and get a perfectly crafted chair of the highest quality, I'm still unsatisfied.
I cancelled my subscription after two days trying to get Gemini to follow my instructions.
1. "it's not available in your country yet" -- although I am currently in (and connected to) Czech republic train, my account is based on Luxembourg. Not sure which one takes precedence, but sad to see...
2. Join Discord -- Unexpected to see this from a Google product. More interestingly, do they really have people/staff there? Or is it just bunch of AI Agents running the discord server, not sure. (Haven't joined either)
Not a single EU country, so, yes.
Honestly though you're not missing much, it doesn't feel revolutionary.
> Join Discord -- Unexpected to see this from a Google product
I did a trial of Gemini Enterprise last month - a product absolutely not ready to be released - and they use Slack which also surprised me. So maybe internal teams at Google are allowed to choose their own messaging platform?
TIL, Google Labs use discord :)
Google may deliver us the AI future Altman promised. The PM who thinks animated PNGs pass for anything real is not on that path.
Turns out its just an animation and there’s a button underneath to actually try it.
This idea of make-things-quick-without-any-real-skills seems fundamentally contrary to achieving lasting quality...
It might be useful for a specific kind is multi step non branching problem, but I didn't have any problems like that to test it with.
That is a bit unexpected to see. Start Up vibes, haha.
Looks like another insane leap forward this.
That’s why I did it. Oh, and it’s nice to be able to chat with potential users. By why not Slack or Teams?
Why does it need that?
The gotcha is the permission scope can be pretty broad (read/write or metadata across Drive), so it’s worth checking what you actually granted.
They need a place to store data, Google Drive is a place for that. Have you used NotebookLM or such which do the same sort of thing?
Yes.
More specifically, I trust Google not to use my files to train its AI if I haven't given permission, but I don't trust Google not to use Opal as a way to get me to give them permission without realising.
Expecting permissions to my entire Google Drive is ridiculous. Yes, I tried not granting that permission (and only granting permission to an app-specific path) and it specifically told me I have to grant full permission . I closed the tab.
it is not even the expected opal.google.com it is opal.google, you need to be 100% sure beforehand that google has the sole rights to the .google tld (which an average person wouldn't know)
The behavior also seems sketchy with it asking for permission but then rejecting any usage if all of the permissions are not approved (why even ask then, you are google)
after re-finding the link through a confirmed subdomain.google.com site I tried to sign in and got this error
``` An unexpected signin error occured.Error checking geo access ```
so I gave up
I’m surprised to see Google directing people to Discord, do they do that for other products?
Just goes to show that google's attempts at chat have been a big flop and even though google chat exists they don't use it.
Do this make an actual production Flutter app or something?
I suppose for any in europe waking up like me that I can save you one click and some time.
Google usually kills projects. What's the point in using this?