search engines want to replace the list of sites with a summarized answer

There will be something new in internet search engines. The new generation wants to do away with results in the form of a list of links and directly give an answer, developed by artificial intelligence.

As is the trend, search engines also want to rely on artificial intelligence. This will involve having him read the web pages for us, then giving either a direct answer to the question asked, or perfectly contextualized elements.

One of the symbols of this new generation is called Arc Search. It has been available for a few days. If, for example, you ask it “fires in Chile”, instead of giving you a simple list of links to news sites, it will create a page. You can read the entire situation summarized there, in the form of a bulleted list, human toll, affected area, environmental impact, ecological toll. It’s easy to read and allows you to quickly go over a question without having to open four or five tabs to gather the information.

Where do the proposed answers come from?

The reliability of this information should, a priori, be good. Artificial intelligence does not invent anything and only draws from the pages that talk about the subject. She summarizes the information she finds there and which is, for the moment, generated by human journalists. We will always have access to the sites which were used to produce this information, and to the list of links that Google would have given. You will have to go down there to see where the information comes from or click on tiny pictograms in the case of Perplexity.ai, another new generation engine.

This raises the question of the choice, visibility and viability of all these information provider sites. Many only make a living from advertising, and therefore from traffic on their pages. The shortfall could be enormous if everything is summarized upstream by the search engine. The problem has already been raised with Google News, which summarized the news. This has also earned them several lawsuits. Now Google pays news outlets for access to their information. This is therefore a problem that newcomers will also have to resolve if they do not want to alienate content producers on the internet.