In a Thursday night bonus issue of The Dispatch, I dig into some non-obvious reasons why a ChatGPT integration with 365 and Bing would be a big win for Microsoft.
The data being first-party and part of a closed ecosystem smacks of "the browser is an inseparable part of the operating system" doesn't it? I guess one of the open questions will be whether or not regulators feel like picking that fight.
I'm still having trouble crossing the 'AI will enhance SERPs' bridge and can't really make Kevin's leap from today's search world to that of fewer but more accurate results. I think more companies are apt to use AI-powered content to try to generate more relevance to certain search terms. Sophisticated advertisers do cost-benefit analyses to figure out how to break down critical search terms and develop a strategy for whether they want to pay for them (SEM) or chase them by developing content (SEO). Makes me wonder what the AI-generated content world will look like. Will the signal-to-noise ratio drop like it did in email? Right now, ChatGPT can feign creation of content, but it takes a lot of verbiage to say very little in terms of substance. What happens when we're flooded with content like that and how does it affect search?
Good points, Tom, particularly about the glut of low-quality content created by algorithms. What's that old Marx quote? “Merely quantitative differences, beyond a certain point, pass into qualitative changes.” (Karl, not Groucho.)
The data being first-party and part of a closed ecosystem smacks of "the browser is an inseparable part of the operating system" doesn't it? I guess one of the open questions will be whether or not regulators feel like picking that fight.
I'm still having trouble crossing the 'AI will enhance SERPs' bridge and can't really make Kevin's leap from today's search world to that of fewer but more accurate results. I think more companies are apt to use AI-powered content to try to generate more relevance to certain search terms. Sophisticated advertisers do cost-benefit analyses to figure out how to break down critical search terms and develop a strategy for whether they want to pay for them (SEM) or chase them by developing content (SEO). Makes me wonder what the AI-generated content world will look like. Will the signal-to-noise ratio drop like it did in email? Right now, ChatGPT can feign creation of content, but it takes a lot of verbiage to say very little in terms of substance. What happens when we're flooded with content like that and how does it affect search?
Good points, Tom, particularly about the glut of low-quality content created by algorithms. What's that old Marx quote? “Merely quantitative differences, beyond a certain point, pass into qualitative changes.” (Karl, not Groucho.)
And I forgot to say the most important thing: thanks for reading and letting me know what you think!