Younger People Aren’t Googling As Much. That’s Bad for Google.
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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Wednesday, December 11th. I'm Belle Lynn for The Wall Street Journal. The hottest job in tech might be at a big bank.

Changes to the tech hiring market mean that working at big banks might be more desirable than ever. We'll find out what banks are doing to reel in top talent from the tech sector. And then Google's core business is under siege. And that could lead to a long-term decline in search traffic and the outsized profits generated from it.

Our tech columnist Christopher Mims tells us what young people and artificial intelligence have to do with the search giant's challenges.

But first, tech talent is flocking to work for banks? Though hiring in the tech sector has become a lot more measured than it was a few years ago, big banks are among the employers still aggressively hiring. For more on how banks are attracting talent and why some techies say they prefer to work at a bank, we're joined by WSJ reporter Isabel Busquets.

So, Isabel, in your story, you say that working in a bank's technology department might finally be as cool as landing a job at Google. Why is that? Yeah, there's a few different reasons. The first is that banks have been making a really big push to sort of evangelize the value of technology within their organizations. They're doing a lot more with tech and with AI specifically than they ever have before.

So they're basically snapping up top researchers, they're building out these big, even pure research departments where, you know, if you're an engineer, you can go and you can work there and you can develop research, you can file patents, you can present at conferences, all the kinds of things that you would normally have to have been at a tech company to do, you can now do at a bank.

And so that's all happening in the background. And at the same time, you have this dynamic where the tech job market is maybe not as crazy as it was a couple years ago. There's not as much hiring. And when talent is looking for where to go, they see the financial sector as one that's

pretty stable. Salaries are good, although they're comparable with tech. But in tech, you're not getting those crazy sort of equity packages and benefits that we were seeing maybe a few years ago. Okay. What else is it about jobs at big tech companies that have made them less appealing than they were in their heyday, say, a few years ago?

Just the fact that these companies aren't necessarily growing as much as they were. They're definitely still taking the biggest percentage of grads, but their minds are just like a little more open to going to other industries, especially as AI becomes something that is really prevalent in every industry and not just the tech industry.

You know, if you're interested in data science and engineering and sort of solving real problems, one of the benefits of working at a bank is they have access to a ton of financial data and it's real customer data. And if you're working at a tech company, you're solving problems that are just a little more theoretical. Someone I talked to compared it to

Tech companies are almost on the supply chain of delivering technology and these banks and other enterprises are more in the demand chain. Are there any other sectors like finance that are upping their cachet with tech job seekers or trying to woo more of them away? Some of the big retailers in the U.S. are making a big push into technology. If you think about like what Walmart's doing,

Healthcare is trying to make a big push into technology as well and trying to hire a lot there. And then insurance, that maybe sort of overlaps with finance a little bit, but they have a similar draw where they have a lot of data and a lot of real-world problems that they can easily solve with technology. That was our reporter, Isabel Busquets. Coming up, people are increasingly getting answers from AI, and younger people are using platforms other than Google to gather their information.

What that means for the search giant after the break.

Out of all the trends moving against Google, the Justice Department's recent attempt to break up the company could be the least of its problems. Among these varied risks, the most culturally charged is the danger that Googling for information seems out of date. But there are plenty of other challenges to its business. And taken altogether, they could damage Google's primary profit engine, which feeds its bets on things like Waymo, its self-driving car unit.

For more on how Google is responding to these threats and why Googling just doesn't seem cool anymore, we're joined by WSJ tech columnist Christopher Mims. Christopher, you write that Google's core business is under siege. Tell us, why is that? Young people, primarily.

turning to AI chatbots instead of Google. They're also searching on TikTok. So some internal documents that some other general reporters dug up found that something like one in three, one in four folks when they open TikTok start searching on it within 30 seconds. And it's the kind of topics you might previously have searched for on Google.

And people of every age are starting their shopping journey on Amazon. So they'll just go straight there to search for things that they want to buy. And it's largely, but not entirely a generational phenomenon. This move away from Google, which still dominates traditional search. It's 90% of traditional search. But what that figure neglects is the fact that

tons of searches happening outside of traditional search. What's the bigger issue here for Google? Google's bigger challenge here is the way this threatens the whole ecosystem of the internet. Because if people are using chatbots, let's say, for search, and more and more of Google's search index is polluted with AI-generated content, then it's a two-sided problem.

There's not ad revenue flowing to the people who are creating the things that were being indexed by Google. And at the same time, the utility of Google search results is going down. But what's the appeal of getting answers from an AI search answer engine as opposed to Google or a classic search engine? For those of us who grew up with Google, it's

It can seem like, why do you need the answer directly? Especially when it might be wrong. But especially younger people. I mean, I have this conversation with my kids all the time. They're like, I just want the answer. And of course, Google knows this. So their so-called search generative experience, it started as a pilot. It had a bumpy rollout. But if you notice now, it's on top of, I would say, a majority of searches.

And it keeps getting more sophisticated. I had the unnerving experience this morning of asking Google a question, like basically a math problem. And it didn't just give me a generative answer that summarized what was on the internet. It reasoned through the answer with citations. And that really blew me away. But that shows that

how seriously Google is taking the threat of not just

answer engines, but answer engines that can reason and think. How widespread are these AI-enabled search engines? ChatGPT has seen explosive growth. Meta is cramming chatbots into everything. There are co-pilots now everywhere. You have Apple Intelligence now, and eventually that will be on every iPhone. You can't use Google Chrome or Chrome OS or a Chromebook and not have it

trying to pop up helpful answers all the time. So this is just becoming ubiquitous. We are all being conditioned to ask questions of the AI first. Okay, let's talk about Google's business for a moment. Why is it important for Google's core search and ad business to really thrive?

The overwhelming majority of Google's revenue is still ads on its own search engine. It is a much smaller portion, something like 20% or less, which is ads across the internet. And so Google is really counting on us seeing those sponsored links and clicking on them

Part of Google's challenge is that in order to be the best answer engine, it really has to physically demote ads and links. And we don't yet have a model for how chatbots can seamlessly incorporate ads into the results that they give us. Perplexity and others are trying to

OpenAI is trying, but it's almost like the transition from traditional or cable TV to TikTok and YouTube. We are going from a medium where it was very natural to insert an ad that you, in a sense, couldn't skip or couldn't avoid to a medium where we just haven't figured out how to create an unavoidable ad, which doesn't ruin the experience.

How else is AI a risk to Google search? The explosion of AI generated content is a huge threat to Google search. Google, when I have asked them about it in the past, has said, we don't care if something is generated by AI as long as the user is having the best experience, is getting the results that they want.

In some ways, that's an admission of the fact that it's increasingly difficult to tell whether something is created by AI automatically. Automatic AI detectors just aren't that great.

And so we're entering a world in which everything that's on the open internet is going to be touched by AI in one way or another. That was our tech columnist, Christopher Mims. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with supervising producer, Catherine Milsop. Logging off, I'm Belle Lin for The Wall Street Journal. We'll sign back in this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

You want a straightforward path to your goals, but at Merrill, we know things may get in the way.

Or if new opportunities can put you at a crossroads, with the bull at your back, you get a personalized plan and a clear path forward. Go to ml.com slash bullish to learn more. Merrill, a Bank of America company. What would you like the power to do? Investing involves risk. Merrill Lynch Pierce Fenner & Smith Incorporated. Registered broker-dealer. Registered investment advisor. Member SIPC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Bank of America Corp.