The future of online discovery

Google search is evolving. Should restaurants care?

Photo via Unsplash

This story starts with glue on a pizza, but really it’s about the way that a tech giant’s whims could change the way people find restaurants. Nothing about this future is certain, of course, and this isn’t a “sky-is-falling” moment for restaurants on the internet. But it is a reminder and a look back at the way one company, Google, has shaped how we discover almost everything, and what its changes signal about the future. 

I’m thinking about this because tech giant Google was forced into a rare corner last week. In the span of a few days, it had to defend its new AI search overviews (after it told searchers to put glue on pizza and eat rocks) and admit that a trove of leaked documents purporting to show details of the company’s fiercely protected search algorithm are, in fact, real. 

While Google’s executives spoke in platitudes and explained that plenty of the bunk results came thanks to people intentionally messing with the tech (have they met anyone who uses the internet?), some journalists, including The Verge editor in chief Nilay Patel (whose site is doing some of the best work here), pushed back. Google does understand that its algorithm affects anyone with an online presence and that its operational decisions have real world consequences for people and businesses, right? Right?

Google holds its search algorithm close, revealing little about how it chooses which content to surface and how it’s ranked. In coverage for The Verge, journalist Mia Sato writes the search algo “is perhaps the most consequential system on the internet.” In other words, a secretive and ever-changing algorithm dictates how everything on the internet is organized and accessed by people who are looking for it. Great!

Which is why, when Google’s leadership introduced AI-generated search summaries that are displayed at the top of some Google search results, many people with interest in how content on the internet is discovered (including this independent journalist) freaked out. Quickly we found that some of the summaries were flat-out wrong (like naming former President Barack Obama the only Muslim President of the United States); some were gross (the aforementioned glue-on-pizza debacle, advice that one intrepid Business Insider reporter followed, for the clicks and the LOLs, obviously); and plenty more spewed unhelpful junk. Worse, some small sites that provide the type of search-optimized information Google’s AI mines for results say search traffic to their sites dropped precipitously after the summaries showed up, putting the future of their (content) businesses in jeopardy.

If you feel a little icky that a powerful company that’s just, you know, testing out how the future of online discovery might work can effectively tank a business, you are not alone. 

Google users conduct an estimated 8.5 billion searches per day. The number is estimated because Google doesn’t release numbers related to searches on its site.¹ These Google search queries are an important source of business for local restaurants. 

“Most new eyeballs on restaurants are going to come from search,” Kyle Norton, the chief revenue officer of Owner.com told me during a recent interview (for my podcast, The Simmer, episode out today!)