Who would have thought that a few years ago, I painstakingly moved back hundreds of physical books from my dad’s house—one of which is titled “Search,” published in January 2006, just as Google was rising and dominating, almost covering everything in the American search scene.
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 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 AI features in its search results. This would be the first major shift for Google after decades of providing free search services.
The third event is: due to the companies involved being quite old, I suspect that American readers behind the scenes might be more concerned than domestic readers.
But do not underestimate Yahoo. Even today, Yahoo remains one of the most visited websites globally, being the most popular news site in the U.S. with over 3 billion visits per month. It ranks second in the sports field and second in email services, and still serves as 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, and the team is still preparing some new things.”
It’s important to note: the first and second events mentioned above both involve the business models of the search industry.
From Perplexity’s perspective: having secured over a hundred million dollars, with a valuation soaring to a billion, it faces pressure to prove its business capabilities to investors. Currently, its revenue mainly comes from subscriptions. However, tens of millions in revenue is far from sufficient for the costs of such AI large model companies. Therefore, advertising revenue will be a supplement.
From Google’s perspective, those who are interested 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 smart answers. However, this is limited to a very small portion (later, domestic search engines all learned from this).
However, because Google’s core business model is advertising, if Google vigorously develops the user experience of generative AI search results, it would be akin to cutting off its own financial lifeline/ digging its own grave—just think, last year alone, Google’s search revenue exceeded $170 billion.
What I know is that Google has always been very conflicted internally. 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, Google can learn from Perplexity—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’s CEO Aravind Srinivas pointed out in an interview: “100% generative AI is meaningless.”
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