22 July 2024 by Mondo2.0

Farewell to Google’s results list, something completely different awaits us

Imagine going to the doctor, describing your symptoms and, in exchange for an expensive fee, simply receiving a list of remedies, with links to click on and explore further: not a word, not an opinion, not a smile, not a consultation. Just a simple A4 list, possibly downloadable as a PDF.

Now imagine going to a travel agency. Once again, you describe your goals, your family composition and your ideal holiday and, in response, you receive yet another A4 list.

In these two examples it is clear that communication, empathy and face-to-face interaction are very important, for example to facilitate a diagnosis or to interpret a need or requirement.

This leads to an obvious consideration: discussing topics in person makes it easier to achieve objectives and makes it possible to create a connection and mutual understanding between the parties.

Of course, a shopping list for the supermarket is very useful; medical prescriptions, sometimes presented in sequence, create order; airline tickets and check-in documentation are essential. But these “lists” represent the final point of a communication process, a journey, not the starting point and certainly not the only means of achieving our goals. All the more so if we are not fully aware of the goal we want to achieve, as in the two initial examples.

For this reason, for these simple reasons, synthetic personalities and A.I. conversational agents will, in the near future, replace search engines and results lists.

The SERP, Search Engine Result Page, the first significant example of a global, all-encompassing service on the Internet capable of providing an answer to every question, is destined to give way, simply because speaking is, in most cases, much easier, more useful and more effective than writing or reading.

And to think that Google has always seemed to me an extraordinary point of arrival, for the convergence of information, for its ability to provide answers quickly and, above all, for its minimal graphic design. That extraordinary white page always at our disposal, a space that appears completely empty yet is infinitely rich in content.

Today, however, after having pleasantly conversed with more than one A.I. service, I have the feeling that I am at the next level of the videogame, where conversation replaces writing and reading texts.

Suddenly the Google interface feels like something old to me, complicated to use and navigate, no longer in step with the times.

I do not want a list of results to click on; I want an answer for me, suited to me and, if necessary, a second answer and a second in-depth explanation, always “ad personam”.

I want a description, a narrative of “my” solution; I want a why, a when, a how, a who. Everything in the same very short, immediate and efficient conversation.

I want to decide the tone of voice of the digital personality I interact with, define its look, the language in which we communicate, its level of humour and sarcasm, its haircut, political orientation, even its tattoos.

I want someone who listens to me and who, without my having to use a keyboard, even while I am on the move, can understand my needs.

I want to buy an airline ticket, book a concert or a B&B, choose a book to read, start a new streaming series, create a music playlist, book a medical appointment, look for a new job, … always and exclusively through my voice.

I feel like a successful manager, a BlackBerry user who suddenly lost interest in his expensive phone, first a status symbol for interactivity and design, then suddenly, rapidly and definitively overtaken by the first iPhone, which put the keyboard on the screen.

Supporting these statements of mine are not only the advances in A.I. services, with expressive conversational agents that are increasingly capable of learning from their mistakes, able to gesture, smile, frown, … but also the current ways in which the Web is used, with users who are increasingly impatient, fast, compulsive and unwilling to read sequentially.

These conditions have pushed the use of the Google SERP to the extreme, with 90% of clicks occurring on the first three proposed results; often only the first link in the list receives users’ attention.

If a long list does not interest us, if a short list does not interest us, perhaps it is better to clarify things through a chat with a digital agent, a synthetic personality.

A friend* always at our disposal.

We are back to square one. It took me years to convince you of the impact of social media (we can see its effects in the polarization of every topic or event, online and in the real world), to persuade you that the search engine was an obligatory step for any in-depth exploration on the Internet; now I have to convince you that every interface, every design element will be heavily revised and replaced by conversational agents, by NPCs, non-player characters.

Today no one wants to read War and Peace in PDF format anymore; soon, perhaps in two years or a little more, no one will want to scroll through an online results list, nor will they want to type into a single field.

Furthermore, this new generation of digital agents, synthetic personalities, will radically change the way we converse online. Agents will provide calm and polite answers, help lower tones that have often become unreasonable, and explain things in many ways, politely, in compliance with the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, in every language.

A warning to programmers: if you are designing a service that provides a results list, cover your head with ashes, humbly apologise online, reset the disk and start all over again. You are still in time.

Farewell results list, farewell buttons and boring forms, farewell menus, farewell clicks, farewell Google SERP!

Soon there will be no room left for you in this extremely fast-moving, contradictory Mondo 2.0.

Mondoduepuntozero

Obviously Google too will adapt its interface through Gemini or something else.