Reading about the plans and changes that Google recently announced at Google I/O, I ask myself if the
"You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Ads" problem maybe wasn't so bad, compared to what is coming…

For 25 years, Google Search was built on a contract. The web provided the content (…) freely crawled. In return, Google sent people back. The link was the unit of exchange. It’s what made the Web thrive as an information system: you publish, Google indexes, users click through, and value flows back to the source. Win-win.

That contract is now broken. Generative UI doesn’t link to your article. It absorbs your article, synthesizes it into a widget, and presents it as Google’s own answer. Information agents don’t send users to websites. They deliver “synthesized updates” with maybe a link or two buried at the bottom. The web was the scaffolding Google needed to build its index, to train its models, to accumulate the world’s information, and put ads next to it to get filthy rich. Now that the content is inside the system, the scaffolding is no longer needed. Google is creating its own context.

Google thinks it no longer needs the Web to deliver answers. And it no longer needs ad slots to deliver ads. What it needs is you. Your emails, your files, your calendar, your purchase history, your travel plans – all flowing into Spark, all building the richest possible picture of who you are and what you’re likely to click on. That’s exactly the kind of personal context those auction models need to work. The prediction module in the prominence allocation framework doesn’t run on keywords. It runs on knowing you.

Oof.