Google's Search VP on Generative AI in Search, User Notes on Search Results, and SEOs — With Cathy Edwards

Cathy Edwards is the VP of Search at Google. Edwards joins Big Technology Podcast to break some news about Google's two newest search features, including a more personalized experience called Follow and a labs product called Notes that allows users to leave feedback on search results. We also cover the state of Google's Search Generative Experience and how the company feels about SEOs after the latest controversy. Tune in for a deep, fun conversation about the cutting edge of Google's most important product, with insights on its latest features. --- From the interview, here's quick note of clarification: Google's new Notes experiment does not currently impact rankings, and the company doesn't have imminent plans to change that. --- You can subscribe to Big Technology Premium for 25% off at https://bit.ly/bigtechnology Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Google Search VP Kathy Edwards joins us to break some news about some rather interesting changes to Google Search and to discuss generative AI's role in their work and what's with those SEOs. All that and more coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis Chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, Head of Enterprise Business Solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale

• 0:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get Frontier Compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  LinkedIn Presents.

• 1:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Today, we're joined by Cathy Edwards, a VP of Search at Google. We've talked before. It's great to have you on the show so we can actually continue this conversation to break some of your news and also follow up on some of the conversations that we've had before. Cathy, welcome to the show.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Thanks, Alex. It's great to be here.

• 1:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Great to have you. The last time we spoke, you and I were having like a little bit of a disagreement about generative search experiences. I was saying that I had some worry about, as a publisher, would traffic ever come to publishers anymore if everybody's just going to get all the answers at the top of search? And you had mentioned that this would spark people's interest in going to visit a number of different links. And so... It's really the main question about about this product is, is it going to keep people within Google or still make room for the open web? You're a number of months into the labs experiment right now where people search, they get a conversational answer at the top through the search generative experience. I have that turned on in my labs and you have the data.

• 2:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  So what are you seeing right now and were my fears overblown?

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, look, I think your fears are totally reasonable and we definitely have designed SGEs specifically as a jumping off point for the open web. We really want to make sure that as we're bringing generative AI into search, that we're really thinking about the health of the open web. And we just, as we talked about last time, we just really genuinely believe that people want to hear information from other people, from other sources, not just from Google or from a chatbot. Do you know what I mean? So we're really excited to say that we're seeing that not only are we showing more links on the page, but that we're seeing like a new diversity of clicks coming off the page

• 3:19Speaker 01

  and that that's really encouraging early data. It's still really early. I just want to repeat that, like we're still early on in this whole experiment, but I'm really encouraged by the data that we're seeing.

• 3:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Interesting. So when you say a new diversity of clicks, that could be taken in so many different ways. I guess what people really are curious about is, does that mean people are clicking more out to the open web or less?

• 3:40Speaker 01

  Well, it's sort of hard to say at this point. Like we, the data that we have is, because it's an opted in experience, you can't just like A B test it like we would if we were just rolling it out. But we are seeing more links and a range of different clicks going out. So we're pretty encouraged by the way that I think generative AI can sort of help people explore the diversity of content on the web.

• 4:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, I'm gonna try to read behind the lines here and you can tell me if I'm being ridiculous or if this is not something that you want to get into. To hear that there's a range of different links and a diversity of clicks to me, it leads me to believe that people are actually clicking out less to the open web. Otherwise, it would be easy to say we're seeing more clicks. Am I misinterpreting that or what am I getting wrong here?

• 4:32Speaker 01

  I can understand that you're like, hey, Google, you have all the data. Like, of course, why wouldn't you just be able to give me a simple yes or no question? It's actually like it's driving our statisticians mad right now because it's an opt-in experience. We actually don't really know. We haven't, you know, run an A/B test at scale yet. So it's actually something we genuinely like, don't fully know the answer to, but we know that we do still see people clicking and we're pretty excited about the way that users are finding even more long-tail content as part of this experience.

• 5:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  And long-tail content means stuff that might have been on the second or third or fourth page of search. And actually, when you're typing in a query and search generative experience is answering, it's going to look much deeper and say, hey, this might be relevant and surface it to you. Am I getting that right?

• 5:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 5:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, that's great news because big technology loves to be on the second, third and fourth page. So very happy about that. One of the reasons why you're releasing this in labs is obviously to kind of see how things are going and see whether people are using it, adopting it, and whether it's something that makes sense to roll out to the broader product. So how are you evaluating the performance of these generative search answers within Google? And, you know, I know the data is early, but you must be evaluating on some metrics. How does it look? And do you think this is going to be something that we're going to end up seeing rolled out to the broader population?

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're really excited by what we're seeing. We're seeing, you know, we track things on a few different fronts. We look at our user research where we actually survey users as well as obviously our metrics that we track from a business perspective. And we're seeing that users are really excited about this experience, like sentiment is higher. We're also seeing users do more complex queries, which is great. It's really... Uh, to me, one of the strongest pieces of evidence that this is helping because it's unlocking uh, these things that users maybe didn't feel like they could ask before. And so, so we're pretty jazzed about that.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Now, having said that, it's early and we want to be really careful here. You know, Sundar has said repeatedly, bold and responsible is the way forward. And so, uh, we're really taking our time to make sure we feel like we've, we've nailed it, um, before we graduate.

• 6:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  And there's definitely, I would imagine, a bit more time because Bing, which initially seemed like a bigger threat, doesn't seem to be making much headway at all in its battle against Google. I'm curious. Um, I doubt, I mean, I opened the floor for you to comment on that if, if you want, uh, but let me just ask another question in case you don't want to touch that. What does advertising look like when it comes to these generative experiences? Because, you know, you write the question, it pops down a big page of text and I don't know if I have seen any ads there. Is the monetization side different from the typical Google search? Is that, is that developed yet? And is that going to hold back this thing from primetime? If you decide from a product end, we like this, let's roll it out.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. So firstly, as you might expect, we're really focused on our users and, and, uh, the health of the web ecosystem. And that's what we're really focused on is we're building this experience. Um, to the ads point, you know, I'm, I'm sure you've heard, we, we keep ads in organic, very separate at Google. And so you have to talk to the ads team if you want to know how ads are doing.

• 7:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  So that's not even playing in at all to your experiment right now with this product?

• 8:02Speaker 01

  We're really focused on building a really great product for users and making sure that the web ecosystem is really healthy.

• 8:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let me, uh, put in my one feature request.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 8:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think it's just slow. Like I, and I understand why, because it takes a much larger level of compute resources to do it. But when I Google something and I have this generative search on, I'm already scrolling down to the results by the time this thing decides what it wants to tell me.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Look, I totally hear you on that. It's something we're working really hard on and we've actually made some pretty amazing progress even in the past six months in terms of speeding it up, but it's still clearly not fast enough. And that, to be frank, is one of the reasons why we don't put it in everyone's hands and it's still an opt-in thing at this stage. Now, you know, if I have confidence in anything, it's Google's ability to continue to improve its, its, its compute efficiency. And so I'm pretty confident we're going to see it continue to come down.

• 9:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  So Substack has a toggle for me that I can decide whether I want generative models to train on the data that I produce, data, basically my articles on big technology. And you're not, I don't get any money for it, but I have it switched on because I kind of actually thinking about your product. Like if I'm on that third page and I have it switched on and others have it switched off, then there's a chance that I actually end up getting way more readership. That being said, like it is helping to power, you know, this training is helping to power billion dollar products across the board. You know, maybe it's with Google, maybe it's with OpenAI. I don't even know. There's no transparency there. What do you think I should do? Do you think I should keep that on? Do you think I should like call Substack and be like pay me for this? Or should we,

• 9:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  should us as publishers be speaking more directly with companies like yours and finding out the right value exchange for the content that is trained on? I mean, recency, right? We do news. If people are asking what's happening today, that's actually quite important for a model. So I'm curious what your perspective is on that.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  So firstly, I can't tell you what you should do, but I can tell you.

• 10:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  What would you do if you were me? Let's, you know, speculate, have some fun.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  I think it's really critically important that publishers like yourself have control and, and they have the choices. And so I'm really pleased that we announced this Googlebot Extended Control for robots.txt. For those of you who don't know, this is a way at which a site owner can instruct the various bots that are out crawling the web, whether or not that those bots can use your, your content. That's on that website or not. And so search has had generative models in it for years and years, even prior to SGE. Uh, so that's still controlled by Google Bot, which has been our, our bot that's existed for 25 years plus.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Um, but now with, with Google Bot Extended, you can choose to uh opt out of, of Bard and our Vertex APIs, which are our cloud, Google Cloud, um generative AI APIs. Um, and I'm really encouraged to see that other players in the ecosystem are being responsible and also publishing their, their controls. So the publishers have the ability to choose what they want to do and what's right for their business.

• 11:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. But it's a tough, it's tough because if you say no, okay, listen, if you're doing, if no one's gonna opt out and their right mind will opt out of search because, I mean, I'm sure some do, but I won't because people see the link and they'll come to the product, right? And I guess, yes, search is a billion dollar, multi-billion dollar, multi-trillion dollar business, right? When it comes to these, allowing these models to train on publisher material, we are basically building the training uh data that is being used to create these billion dollar companies to the point where Andreessen Horowitz uh recently in a submission to the copyright uh uh agency in the US was like, if we are forced to pay for the copyright for the material that we train on,

• 12:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  our billions of dollars of investment in AI companies will be worth a lot more. Do we need to get to a point where there's a fail, fair value exchange here between the publishers and the tech companies that are using this to build very lucrative business? It has to be a little bit more than like opt in, opt out, don't you think?

• 12:20Speaker 01

  So, look, I think we're really early. You're gonna hear me say that a lot. I do genuinely think we're really early. And I think it's really, I mean, I will say, you've said, you know, multi-billion dollar businesses. I don't think there's a multi-billion dollar generative AI business in terms of revenue yet. I mean, valuations are one thing.

• 12:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. It will get there. I mean, OpenAI itself is 1.3 billion run rate this year, so.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Sure. I think, uh, and you'd have to ask them about like what they think in terms of a value exchange. But in terms uh, for us, we definitely are focused on how do we make sure that the web is healthy as we go through all of this? Obviously, like, the web changed humanity for the better and it's, you know. Really important for the world, I think. And so we're really focused on being good stewards of that. I think having publisher control so you can choose to be in or out is the right thing. And then I think over time, we'll figure out if there are other business models needed.

• 13:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, it'll be interesting to watch it play out. And yeah, I don't know. I think generative, there's definitely some use cases that I'm using generative search for. Honestly, it's become like a crucial, and I know Google was doing this beforehand, but thesaurus for me and like almost like a mini Wikipedia in some cases. But yeah, it'll be very interesting to watch it evolve. And I'm very curious about the business situation as it plays out. Let's talk now about the news that you came here to share. I mean, this is cool. We're going to be breaking some news as this podcast goes out. So apologies if we gave the competition 12 minute heads up here. But look, you have these two new new features coming out, one that's rolling out more broadly, one that's very interesting coming out on labs. The

• 14:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  first is called follow, and I'm just going to quote right off the blog post that you've sent over before. So it says, we're introducing the ability to follow exactly what you're interested in from your favorite sports team to something more specific like vegan cooking. With follow, you'll see more content related to what you care about across search with less effort. So does this mean I'm going to be able to like follow newspapers, sports teams, the latest in like, you know, stir fry recipes, which is basically the only thing I can cook. I mean, what is it going to look like in practice?

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the the concept is, you know, what's so amazing about search is that you can type in any query, right? And no matter how weird or specific long tail it is, you can type in any query and get get some results. And so the concept is that you can come in and follow those search queries. And so whether that search query is your favorite sports team, or whether that's that query is something really long tail, like maybe it's not even stir fry recipes, it's like stir fry recipes containing broccoli that are gluten free, right? Like you could follow something that's specific. And then in Discover, the homepage of the Google app,

• 15:18Speaker 01

  and on that search results page, if you do the query again, you'll see content that's new for you, including perspectives from across the web. So it's a really great way of sort of staying on top of that interest that you have.

• 15:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's fascinating. And so when is that going to roll out?

• 15:35Speaker 01

  So we're starting to roll that out as of the day that this podcast goes live. We're gonna take it a little slow, but it'll definitely be out by, fully to every single person by December.

• 15:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Very interesting. So what I'm sensing is like, there's stuff that shows up on the web that you might want to know about, but the only way to find out about it is to just frequently Google.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Try to find it.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  And so this is just a way to be like, all right, you want to know what, it means amazing how specific you're getting also. You want to know what's going on in these areas you talk about. We're actually going to push it to you.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Exactly. And I think

• 16:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's cool.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  That, you know, this is just, Google understands information so amazingly. How can we help you stay on top of that without having to, you know, require you to come back and do a query all the time?

• 16:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Can you talk a little bit about, I mean, this is, it's interesting because of course it's a helpful feature. It also feels like something that's so intuitive and it's amazing that we're here in, you know, year 20 plus of Google and we're just starting to see this. So what was the compelling event to create something like this inside the company?

• 16:43Speaker 01

  It's a good question. I think we just really have been very focused on understanding what was going on with users. And we saw, you know, we did this thing, maybe last year, I can't actually even remember the timing that we, where we put these widgets at the top of Discover that are connected to sort of different things you might want to stay on top of. So there's a weather widget. There's a stock widget. There's a cricket widget, which like the cricket world cup is going on right now, which I'm very interested in. You are probably not, but believe me, I'm very interested in it.

• 17:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't have the patience for cricket.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  It's a very good game. You should, you should give it another go. Try a T20 game. But anyway, what we saw is that these people love these widgets. And they just keep coming back and like, what's going on? Like I now wake up every morning and I'm like, what's going on with the cricket? And I, and I check these widgets. And we really had this insight that Sometimes the query, it's amazing that you could come to Google and express anything you want, right? But sometimes to just continue to express over and over is a little tiresome, right? So this idea, this really proved to us that there was this idea that users just want to stay on top of their information without having to do the queries. And we really wanted

• 18:02Speaker 01

  to extend that. So it wasn't just like the few widgets that we came up with, but that users could really do anything and express their interests, how they already are expressing their information needs to Google today, which is the search query. So.

• 18:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Absolutely. So I want to go back to our AI or generative AI conversation. You know, for a long time, we've been hearing Google talk about how this company is going to become not just a place where you search, but something that is assistive, right? Something that kind of knows what you're interested in, or you help shape what it knows that you're interested in, and it will push that to you. And I'm hearing this, and it's like, interesting, because it's like, of course, this is going to happen in the main search area. But it also feels like this is something that you might want to tune like your Google Assistant for. We don't really hear a lot about the Google Assistant anymore. So is this kind of something that as we end up, I mean, forming more personalized relationships with Google seems like another way, another way

• 18:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  that that happens is through an assistive agent. So is this sort of the groundwork for that? Could you see this playing in there? Tell us a little bit about your thoughts on that front.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so firstly, I'll say the Assistant just announced some very exciting news just recently. So you should go check that out, and definitely more to come here. But.

• 19:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wait, what's the updates on the Assistant?

• 19:19Speaker 01

  So we announced that we're bringing Bard into the Assistant, which will be launching soon. It's pretty exciting. I don't know a lot more of the details. You'll have to talk to them about that. But there's a bunch of very exciting stuff happening on that front. I think for us. We're really focused on like, what is the core mission of Google Search? It is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible, right? And so that focus is where we are really like, how can we just improve that over time? And I think the question's about, you know, an assistant you ideally want to do more for you. You also wanted to read your email and maybe book a restaurant for you and those sorts of things.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  We're really focused around this concept of just how do you get your information? How do you answer the questions that you have and how do you stay on top of your interests?

• 20:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And there's also some news with the perspectives side of thing. If I'm not mistaken, that when you're searching on Google mobile right now, there's a perspective tab that will include things like tweets and blog posts and stuff like that. So you're going to roll that out more broadly also.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're bringing it to desktop. This is something that we're really super excited about. We really have heard loud and clear that users really want the perspectives of other people when they're searching for information and it's been doing so great on mobile. So we're really excited that it's finally coming to desktop too.

• 20:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I personally enjoy it. For me, it's also a way to sort of stay on top of what's happening on Twitter or X without like really having to log in very much. Like when I take my mandated time away from the app, when I feel my mental health going down the toilet, I still want to check on what's going on in the world. And this is actually like a pretty cool module. So on that note, okay, there was a moment where we had social media, right? Where like we would follow our interests and people would push our interests to us through feeds. Now that still exists, just kind of in weakened forms on places like Facebook, but also X and Threads and Blue Sky or Truth Social, whatever you use. And

• 21:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, it's also like I'm seeing Google come in to to talk a little bit more about what's the latest that happened. And it feels like, you know, intentional or not, this is an opportunity to take advantage of that vacuum that's being left by social media going to its next evolution. Is that something you think about? And is that an opportunity for you? I'm not saying build Google Plus again, but I'm wondering, you know, how how that factors.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we're definitely, this is not a social network we're building. We're really focused on the idea of people following their interests and staying on top of their information needs. It's not about

• 22:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Which is exactly, but that's exactly like what you would do on Twitter. I'm not saying you're gonna be, you're building a new Twitter, but it does seem like the the decline there has left an opening for you.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know. I don't really see it that way. I think we're really focused on, you know, and I think honestly, social media is doing pretty great. More generally, I mean, I think like Tik Tok's going fantastically, Instagram's going fantastically. So I I I'm not particularly worried about the health of social media overall as a segment. Obviously, that's something we rely on for our perspectives filter. So we're really invested in making sure that all works really well. I think that we're just really focused on how do we help people with their information needs? And that it just seemed this really great opportunity to sort of allow people to stay on top of that more proactively.

• 22:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  I just think this data in in a big technologies newsletter this past week, but it's actually worth worth highlighting because you're right, Instagram is doing incredibly. It's engaged hours per day, 1.1 billion, and its growth year over year is up 29%. So that's wild. The reason why I say you have an O, and this is per Sensor Tower, which is a app analytics company. The reason why I say there's an opportunity to fill a gap here is because Twitter's engaged hours per day is down 8%. So, but anyway, I understand that it's not like you don't want to be in that category, and it's probably not something that you're you're focusing all too much. Just looking at it from the outside, though, it does seem like Like an opportunity. All right, let's go to a quick break. Kathy Edwards is here, Search VP for Google.

• 23:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  You might know Google is the place where you search. Everyone says search is boring and static. I disagree. Every time Kathy and I talk, we have so many interesting things to discuss. Speaking of which, on the other side of this break, we're going to talk about Notes. It's a new product and it makes Google a little bit more, I don't know, interactive or community focused. Anyway, I'm going to just leave that tease and hope you stay with us after the ad. So we can talk more about Notes. This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Copilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it and prove it's under control. That's exactly what Avpoint does.

• 24:28Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 26:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Cathy Edwards, the VP of Search at Google. All right, Cathy. So notes, this is from your blog post. Notes will let people share their knowledge right on search, helping others find the best answers for their weirdest or most wonderfully unique questions and discover what's most useful for them on the web. It's very interesting. It's like giving people a voice right in the search results. Tell us more about this.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm just so excited about this launch. So we're launching in labs, we're launching in the US and then in India. And we're really bringing this layer to search results where people can provide their perspectives and, you know, advice to other users. And as you said, and in your TIP, I thought it was great. It's like, this is really about trying to make search a bit more interactive and a bit more human, which is what we're hearing, you know, our users really want.

• 27:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  So what's this going to look like in practice? Like, I'm searching Google and what do I see in these results with these notes involved?

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you'll see the same results page that you normally see. Under each result, you'll see the opportunity to either add a note or see that notes that other people have have left. You'll see how many people have left notes and you'll be able to click through and see the additional like information that other people have added onto that, onto that link.

• 27:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  And so can you give us like a practical example of, you know, I'm scrolling through my feed, I'm searching for X and I might see Y?

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, here's a really great example, which I think highlights why this is so great for both users, but also actually for publishers. So let's say you're a recipe writer and you've written this recipe for like lasagna, right? And it's got meat in it. If I'm a vegan, I could come along and say, hey, you know, add a note to this recipe and say, to this recipe, you know, URL saying, hey, I made this vegan by subbing out the fish sauce and, you know, with coconut aminos and used Impossible Meat instead. And suddenly, actually, as a user, I now get a range of different recipes. I don't just get recipes that are written, you know, specifically for vegan people.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  And I also, as a publisher, that, that now enables that to rank for vegan lasagna recipes, right? So it's sort of allows other people to come in and give their helpful tips in a way that I think will be really, really helpful for users.

• 28:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's very interesting. So it could actually be like more of like a constructive, like, like, almost like a genius, like annotation.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 28:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  The old Rap Genius style. That's interesting. But that, you know, it's kind of, I was almost thinking of like people like rating, like saying this was like a good recipe, this was a bad recipe, but you're imagining people being even more constructive here.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. Like coming in and saying, you know, if you're like, which hike to go on in the Bay Area? And you get a result that has like 10 hikes, you know, somebody could come in and let's say that result was a little bit out of date now, right? Like somebody could come in, leave a note and say, actually, number nine is now shut down, you know, like you can't go on a hike anymore. So it's a way of bringing that, like that human perspective, which will include sort of a fresh perspective to the web.

• 29:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  People are going to say this is Google's way of making sure you spend even more time on Google. Like, do I need to even click the link to see all these other alternative hikes or updates? What do you think about that?

• 29:51Speaker 01

  I mean, that's really, we're really trying. I feel like I've said it a lot already today. I'm going to say it again.

• 29:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Gotta ask the questions.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  We really care about the web ecosystem.

• 30:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  And a lot of this is actually, we think, a way of helping keep the web healthy by allowing people to share those human perspectives against it. And, you know, things like the freshness, things like bringing in those different ways of looking at things. And so we're really focused on making it easy for users to, you know, come in and interact on search and in making sure, like, this is specifically designed to link through to the content.

• 30:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  So we're still focused on making sure you're all able to get your voice out there.

• 30:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Okay, that's, that's good. When, when, when people come and they give negative feedback, they say, this website is out of date. You know, that's, you know, I was looking for information on, I think you have a marathon example in your blog post. I was looking for information on the 2023 marathon. This is the 2022 marathon. And by the way, you can no longer do like a, a proxy pickup for your race number. Is that going to impact the way that these pages rank in your search results?

• 31:06Speaker 01

  So it's very early. I could imagine over time, maybe, but right now, no. We're really very focused on learning. That's why we're launching in labs. This is obviously a pretty new thing for us to do. As you said, it's been 25 years and, and we're very interested to see what happens. And we're also, you know, very interested in engaging with publishers through this process and learning about what matters to you. You know, in the case of that marathon example you gave, I actually think that's like incredibly helpful. And I wouldn't see that as a negative thing from a publisher perspective, but you could imagine other notes being published that, that maybe publishers aren't so thrilled about. So we're

• 31:50Speaker 01

  thinking about ways you can integrate into Search Console and, and connecting publishers with insights from these things.

• 31:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's almost like taking the comment section and making it more prominent. And it's like, I don't know, from a publisher, it's like, man, you used to make me like click in before you punched me in the face. And now you're going to do it right in search results. Like, do you have like some concerns about how nasty people can get in the comments? And what are the, what, yeah, what do you think about that? Like, there's also this balance between like letting people say what they need to say. And then, you know, trying to maintain some sense of civility on the most important, you know, page that Google loans. Search result page.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  Totally. And, uh, yes, this is something we have been thinking very, very deeply about, as you can imagine. And thankfully for us, we have 25 years of ranking web content, which can also be pretty dicey as well. And so we've learned a lot through that. We also have been spending a lot of time with our YouTube colleagues.

• 32:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  I was about to say, you must be hanging out with YouTube people.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Best friends now. I mean, we were best friends before, but we spent a lot of time. We've learned a lot from their processes. And we have a whole aligned policy, you know, we have a bunch of policies. We're definitely taking an approach that combines an algorithmic approach with a human moderation approach. Cause we really do want to get this right. And this is frankly, one of the reasons that we launched in labs is because we want to make sure that we have the time to sort of test and learn.

• 33:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Are people going to be able to like vote up and down the comments, whether they're helpful or not?

• 33:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, you'll be able to thumbs up and thumbs down.

• 33:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, that's great. What is the key? Because, uh, not too long ago, I'm talking like three or four years ago, YouTube comments were one of the nastiest places on the internet. And now they are cleaned up. Like you can actually go in and read lots of constructive things. What I've heard is that YouTube effectively went in with a large list of words that just could not show up there. A lot of negative sentiment and it tried to. induce positive constructive conversations. So is that the secret to YouTube? And if that's the case, can you really apply that to search?

• 34:01Speaker 01

  So I know the person very well who is responsible for cleaning up YouTube comments. She's amazing. And

• 34:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  What's her name?

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Siobhan. And I can tell you that she is, there's far more than what you just said in terms of like a blacklist of bad words.

• 34:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  We got time.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Ton of different things to actually, they've had a ton of different levers to, to really make progress there. And there are a bunch of them that are applicable in the search space as well. So we've, we've really dug in there and learned a lot from them.

• 34:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, it really is. It's, it's wild, the shift that's happened on YouTube. And it's interesting because I know this is like tough. It sort of goes to like, how much content moderation do you actually want to have? And, you know, I've definitely, I hear the people who are like, you know, be careful to slippery slope. On the other hand, like I think prop, like properties have a right to make sure that the stuff that they're incentivizing isn't, you know, just disgusting bile. And obviously it's been a very strong arm approached by YouTube, which would like probably send like a lot of folks who've like followed the Twitter takeover into a tizzy. However, like, you know, the benefit is that the product is actually pleasant to be on now.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think that matters. I think it matters to users that, that, that you

• 35:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  I would agree.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  Having said that, I think there are unique, like the, the fact that this is an information product, as opposed to sort of more of an entertainment product brings different challenges. And this is something what's been very hard about. It's a really hard problem, I will say. And where, where we've done, I mean, I can't tell you the amount of work we've done to proactively prepare for all the things we could think could go wrong. But this is one, as I say, another reason why we're launching in labs is we're going to see what happens and we're going to learn and we're going to really rapidly respond if we see things happening that we think are the wrong thing.

• 35:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, I'm just like thinking through like, imagine like a New York Times article surfaces in search about the Israel Hamas war and just like the the battle on social media there is like extremely intense. And now you're inviting it effectively into the search results where there's gonna even more at stake. You feel comfortable doing that?

• 36:19Speaker 01

  Well, so we will have policies in place and notes won't appear on every query. So the notes won't appear on that specific query because we're not gonna, we want to make sure that we're not inviting, you know, if we're if we think that a space is risky, really risky, we're not going to go there just yet, but they will be on the the majority of queries.

• 36:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, looking, looking back at a at a Twitter example, they have this community notes product. Are you familiar with?

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love that.

• 36:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's actually, so did your team take any inspiration from it? Because I actually think it's the best, one of the best features that Twitter has put out there, which is like, yes, the tweets will stand. They're not going to take tweets down. But if they are outright lying or missing important context and get a large, you know, percentage of you, they're going to look to the community to then go ahead and and share the perspective. And maybe that's something that could also be applied here.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, look, I think that product is fantastically well done. And I think it has added a lot to, you know, my experience on on Twitter or X. I, it's definitely not exactly what we're trying to do with notes. We're really focused on, you know, that product is really like a fact checking product, whereas we're trying to provide like a more general social, like human layer in search. But yeah, we'll see how it evolves over time. And I think it's definitely something we're watching closely and learning from.

• 37:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, great. So, one area that this could come into play, and this is gonna just bring us into our next topic, is people see sites that have been engineered for search engine optimization, and they get frustrated. There's really no feedback mechanism there. So, is this in some way a response, or gonna help Google fight against some of the the baity tactics, shall we say, that some professional and black hat SEOs use to try to rank higher within Google?

• 38:17Speaker 01

  So firstly, I mean, just to talk about the SEO question directly. Look, we have a long history of really focusing on fighting spam in search. I'll also say that SEO is not a bad thing. I mean, people advising less technically savvy people about how to structure their content to be helpful to users is not something that we say shouldn't happen. We do hear, and we have been focused on, that, look, search is never a solved problem. That's one of the reasons that I love working on search, is because, for all of the amazing things it does, because it is this infinite product where people can do any query,

• 39:01Speaker 01

  and your content corpus is totally changing on a daily basis. You just have new problems to solve all the time. And so, we have a very focused team working on this made-for-search-engine content. And we actually did a launch recently that had a pretty big impact on that front. It's something we're continuing to work on. We hear what users are saying about this, and we wanna fix it. I do think the idea of Notes provides, you know, Notes, you'll be able to create notes in the Google app, right?

• 39:41Speaker 01

  You need a Google account to do it, so it provides a different level of, layer of content that isn't really like these

• 39:53Speaker 01

  People who are trying to like spam search with this content can't come in really create it that way. And so it provides an interesting, like more authentic human layer, you know?

• 40:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. But the feedback layer, like, you know, I'm just imagining searching for that recipe. Let's say I'm following, what was the recipe that you had, the vegan?

• 40:11Speaker 01

  Vegan, vegan lasagna, yeah.

• 40:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Vegan lasagna. I'm on vegan lasagna and I had to scroll for like 20 minutes to find the actual recipe. I could actually, which is, I think SEO tactic, I'm not sure. They want to optimize for time spent. Anyway, you could have people in the notes being like, hey, this is ridiculous. They kept me going, you know, my finger hurts from scrolling. And then I finally got the, you know, I mean, that could actually be really good feedback, both for Google and also for people clicking in. Like, imagine people, like, it might then incentivize people to just give the goods right away and then get the good notes saying, hey, this delivered exactly what I wanted and I didn't have to scroll and it was right there in the top of the window.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  I mean, I think, I think it's, you know, anytime you build an ecosystem, you don't, like, things sort of happen that emerge out. And one of the reasons that we're launching in labs is to sort of see whether this sort of behavior happens. It's not, I think it could go in a number of different ways. And yeah, I mean, certainly, if this becomes a tool to like, help users connect with the information that they really want more easily and incentivize website owners to create the content that users really want, I think that'd be great.

• 41:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, awesome. I think it's cool. I'm going to turn it on in labs. I mean, I like turning everything on in labs. Like, let's, let's just go wild here.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  A really great test out for us, Alex.

• 41:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Of course. Well, we'll see about that. But this should be fun. So, just to, we talked about the SEO. The reason why this is top of mind is because The Verge, we're not going to litigate the whole SEO industry in the time we have left. But it's worth bringing up that The Verge had this story by Amanda Chicago-Lewis, actually, one of my former colleagues at BuzzFeed. She used to cover weed, which is interesting. I like saw this, I was like, oh, she's gone from marijuana to tech reporting. And the title is the people who ruined the internet, talking about SEO, people who are working in professional SEO. I felt the title was, was a little less charitable than it should have been. It seemed a little bit sensational. But anyway.

• 42:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  There was a few interesting things that I thought was worth, were worth highlighting here. The first, and I'd just like to share them with you and see if you have a response.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 42:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  The first was Amanda spoke about how, I'm just gonna read. "Googling anything can now feel like looking up sneaker in the dictionary and finding a definition that sounds both incorrect and suspiciously as though it were written by someone promoting Nike." So the definition she puts is footwear that allows you to just do it. "Perhaps this is why nearly everyone hates SEO and the people who do it for a living. The practice seems to have successfully destroyed the illusion that the internet was ever about anything else than selling stuff." What do you think about that?

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Look, I think that we have a ton of data that suggests that the overwhelming majority of users are really happy with the search results that we, that we return. I, as I said, there are always queries we can do better on. I mean, let me tell you, as somebody who like works on a search engine, you are constantly aware of the ways that you can improve. And I think that we definitely do need to continue to improve on this front. But I think we're, I just think that like, it's categorically not true that that's people's typical data experience of using Google search.

• 43:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. The other thing that was interesting to me was this SEO professional, name is Darren Babin, and was talking about what this wave of generative AI is gonna do, right, to, to what the web looks like and in turn what search looks like. So this is a quote from, from Babin that Amanda relays. "All the assholes that are out there paying shitty link building companies to build shitty articles now can go use a free version of GPT. Soon, he said, "Google results will be even worse, dominated entirely by AI-generated crap designed to please the algorithms produced and published at volumes far beyond anything humans could create, far beyond anything we'd seen before." I mean, is this something you're seeing now?

• 44:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Are you anticipating more of this? How do you fight back against these GPT-created articles?

• 44:33Speaker 01

  So firstly, I'll say.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Even as he points out, like, this isn't new. We've had years and years of people creating a bunch of content that's really not for other humans, right? And that's the guidance that we give is create content for humans, not for search engines, right? And we have a very long history. We have a wonderful spam team who have a very long history of fighting off this content. Now, do I think that there's going to be a lot of AI-generated content on the internet as we move into the future? Absolutely. That I don't think we've, we, and we've issued guidelines, actually, that say that just because content is AI-generated doesn't make it bad, right? I think that AI, generative AI, will assist a lot of creators

• 45:21Speaker 01

  in creating content over time. What we do want is for it to be helpful to human beings and not creative for search engines. And we fought it before and we'll fight it again in the future. So while the internet might contain a lot of this stuff, we, we actually don't, I know that, you know, search engines index the internet. We actually throw out a lot of content and it doesn't even go into our index because it is spam. And we'll continue doing that on this front.

• 45:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  So this fear that people create these websites and then the models train on them and then they sort of, you know, they chew their own cud, so to speak. They throw it up, they ingest it, they chew it up again, then they puke it out again. That was actually way more visceral than I expected, but it's actually pretty, like, if you've been to a farm, this stuff happens, people. Okay. Anyway, that's, that fear is a little bit overblown, you think?

• 46:16Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm obviously not the team that builds a large language models, but I think they're pretty intentional about this stuff.

• 46:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it's not just gonna be everywhere in the search results.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're, we're very intentional about what goes into the search index. We're very intentional about how we rank and we think we're pretty good at fighting this sort of spam.

• 46:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, great. Let's go full circle here as we come to a close. When ChatGPT initially came out and then Bing very quickly integrated it, there was a lot of concern from industry watchers and Google shareholders, the whole crew, right? That like, search was over and now everything was going to happen through the chatbots. You're sitting as a VP at Search at Google. I'm curious, what has it been like from your perspective in terms of the magnitude of this challenge? I mean, obviously, Google has its own answer now in Bard, and you have generative search experiences. How has this played out over the past? You were looking at a year since ChatGPT came out. What's the magnitude of what you've actually felt inside Google?

• 47:20Speaker 01

  I mean, honestly, and this is a personal answer, like, this is the most exciting time in my whole career. It's so great to, the possibilities that I can see about really helping people connect to information. It's super exciting to do what I do and to feel like we're creating the future together. It's amazing. And I'm really, you know, we just have these really clear guiding principles as we go through this. And one of those fundamental guiding principles is that while we think that technology can really help enable creation in really amazing, powerful ways,

• 48:02Speaker 01

  I think that fundamentally, people want to hear about information from other people. And so figuring out how we build something that combines the best of those, and that's why you see things like Follow and Notes and Perspectives that we're launching today that are not about generative AI at all. To me, the combination of these things is what's going to be the really amazing future. And so we're really excited to build, excited to build that.

• 48:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, but outside of having such a good time doing this, do you think the format of search is going to change?

• 48:34Speaker 01

  I mean,

• 48:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Is it going to fundamentally change or is it? Go ahead.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  Look, I think if you go back to Search in like 2000, it looks pretty different today, actually.

• 48:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's still a page with links, though. Like, people are saying it's now going to be a chatbot.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  I think it's still going to be a page of links. I really believe that.

• 48:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Cathy Edwards, thank you so much for joining.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Thank you, Alex.

• 48:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Great way to end it. Thank you. It's always great to speak with you. Appreciate you being here and going through all this stuff with me and no questions out of off limits or out of bounds, which we always appreciate here. So thank you so much. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for listening, everyone. Great to have you here. Thank you, Nate Guatney, for handling the audio. LinkedIn for having me as part of your podcast network. And all you, the listeners, if you enjoyed today's show, please give us a rating of five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And maybe one day you can do it on Google with notes. Fingers crossed on that front. And if you're a first time listener, please hit follow or subscribe. We do these once a week on Wednesday and then we break down the news every Friday. All right, that'll do it for us. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

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