What must worry Google above all is the decline in search marketing itself. You’ll recall we reported last week that search’s share of U.S. Internet ad spend has been falling. Today I’ll add this Jungle Scout report that people are starting their online shopping searches less with “search engines” (presumably mostly Google) and Amazon, and more with Walmart and TikTok. Yikes!
Google has a lot on its collective mind, from renaming its FLEDGE ad targeting API (now Protected Audience API) to watching another nine states join the anti-trust lawsuit filed by eight other states and federal Department of Justice. But they still had time to join the verification parade with a new, blue badge for advertisers. The spread of verification seems to reflect a broad social worry about knowing who to trust, but maybe I’m over-thinking.
Have you been wondering when Amazon Web Services would join Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure in offering generative AI tools? Wonder no more: they announced a collection of services last week that will let developers build AI chatbots and other tools using pretrained models from Anthropic, AI21, Stability AI, and Amazon’s very own Titan family.
Google will pay to carry stories from Canadian news outlets under an agreement announced yesterday. Details are sparse but the process for compliance with government’s C-18 law has been simplified to meet some Google objections. Meta, the only other firm required to make payments under the law, has not changed its decision to block reliable news.