The Five Most Key Takeaways from This Blog Post
- The 43% statistic for failure does not mean that the AI Overviews answers were totally incorrect or incoherent. Rather, it just means that the answers had misleading or inaccurate information.
- As one could expect, the more complex the topic, the more of a struggle it was for AI Overviews to offer a satisfactory answer. If you want more simple, straightforward answers to matter-of-fact questions, the odds were better of getting a correct answer.
- These problems challenge one of the promises of the emerging technology gen-A.I. search, that being the ability to offer answers to longer, more complex questions in the form of a chatbot-like conversation.
- For business owners, it is worth knowing about this because such your-money-or-your-life (Y.M.Y.L.) questions could lead unsuspecting business owners down the wrong path. Examples include misinformation on filing taxes, which if followed could lead to fines or other severe penalties for tax infractions.
- Overall, the key-est takeaway for business owners is that Y.M.Y.L. questions should generally be settled outside of AI Overviews, because Google clearly needs to work out the problems with this tool in its current incarnation.
Money Troubles?
At this point of digital immersion, is there any question that we will not plug into a search engine in search of an answer?
The answer is, no, probably not. People go to WebMD instead of someone with an M.D. Likewise, someone will search online for tax information in lieu of finding a trustworthy tax accountant.
If there are questions that are simply too long or complex-seeming, usually we break them down into bits to get our Internet answers.
But the advent of technology like AI Overviews makes it possible that we can punch in long, multifaceted queries into a search engine and get an accurate, coherent, and trustworthy answer.
Possibly. For now, however, the search giant Google—the company that one could reasonably expect ought to be offering the most sophisticated gen-A.I. search tools—is struggling to get AI Overviews to offer trustworthy answers to some pretty important questions about finances.
Some Complex Questions Appear Simple
The heading of this section is something to keep in mind in your future AI Overviews searches.
Though the second Key Takeaway of this article mentioned that simple, straightforward questions had better odds of netting a correct answer, it is worth remembering that even a simple-seeming question, and a simple-seeming answer, may only appear to be so.
However, actually getting the question right can be another thing.
For instance, some tax-related questions can actually be pretty simply put. The key thing to understand here is that a short question and a short answer are not the same thing as a simple question and a simple answer.
If an analogy here could help, consider the case of mathematicians who sacrifice multiple trees’ worth of paper just to get a one-line answer to a one-line problem.
Likewise, some questions, especially finance-related, can be quite involved in finding an answer.
Take for instance the question “What companies should I invest in?” The end-user’s answer may consist of a list of what companies, indeed, but the reality is that there is a whole lot of “why” that goes into answering that “what”.
Business owners should be concerned about the gap of how an A.I. search engine answers “why”‘s before giving a final “what”. Though the quick, convenient answers that these gen-A.I. search engines offer may be indeed convenient, the unanswered questions are worth looking into.
Other Great GO AI Blog Posts
GO AI the blog offers a combination of information about, analysis of, and editorializing on A.I. technologies of interest to business owners, with especial focus on the impact this tech will have on commerce as a whole.
On a usual week, there are multiple GO AI blog posts going out. Here are some notable recent articles:
For Businesses and Other Organizations, What Makes a Successful Chatbot?
IBM Watson vs. ChatGPT vs. Gemini: How Will Each Affect Search Engines?
Using A.I. to Find Resources for Business Owners
How Would Restricting Open-Source A.I. Affect Business Owners?
The EU’s A.I. Act Has Become Law: The Implications for Business Owners (Especially American)
In addition to our GO AI blog, we also have a blog that offers important updates in the world of search engine optimization (SEO), with blog posts like “Google Ends Its Plan to End Third-Party Cookies”.
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