Who could have imagined that a few years ago, I painstakingly搬回了几百本纸质书 from my dad’s house—one of which is titled “Search”, published in January 2006, which was the time when Google was rising and dominating, almost covering everything in the American search industry.
But in the blink of an eye, it has lost much of its reference value.
Why? Let me first list a few major events that have occurred in the American search industry over the past two weeks.
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The first event is that Perplexity announced it will launch an advertising business model.
The second event is: Google has beenexposed for considering charging for its AI features in search results. This would mark a significant shift after decades of Google providing search services for free.
The third event is: due to the involvement of very old companies, I suspect that the American readers behind the scenes might be more concerned than domestic readers.
However, do not underestimate Yahoo. Even today, Yahoo remains one of the most visited websites globally, the most popular news site in the United States, with over 3 billion visits per month. It ranks second in the sports field and second in email services; it is still a very active and genuine online information center in the U.S.
Last January, Yahooswore to make search cool again (there’s a big search box at the top of Yahoo’s homepage). At the end of March this year, Yahoo’s Senior Vice President and General Manager Brian Provost stated on X: “We should stick with it; the team is still preparing some new things.”
It is important to note that the first and second events mentioned above both relate to the business model of the search industry.
From Perplexity’s perspective: having raised over 100 million dollars and reached a valuation of 1 billion, it faces pressure to prove its business capability to investors. Currently, its revenue mainly comes from subscriptions. However, millions of dollars in revenue is far from sufficient for the costs of such an AI large model company, so advertising revenue will be a supplement.
From Google’s perspective,those behind the scenes should still remember:
Google has actually long provided some generative AI-like search results at the top of its search results—directly giving intelligent answers. However, this was limited to a very small portion (later, domestic search engines all learned from this).
However, due to the limitation that Google’s core business model is advertising, if Google vigorously develops the user experience of generative AI search results, it would be equivalent to cutting off its own financial path / digging its own grave—just think, last year alone, Google’s search revenue exceeded 170 billion dollars.
What I know is that Google has been internally conflicted.And now, due to the impact of the generative AI wave and the fact that American users have become very accepting of the “subscription” business model in recent years.Therefore, Google can learn from Perplexity in reverse—charging for AI search results.
So, what exactly is the ultimate realm of search companies? Now, let’s get back to the point:
Interestingly, recently, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas pointed out in an interview: “100% generative AI is meaningless.”
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