Google's Future at Risk with Opera Browser's New AI Summarizer
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Opera, which is of course a web browser. They have this AI assistant that they've had out for a while, I think almost a year now, but they have a new feature released on it that I actually think is whether it's this or something else is the future of search. And I think this is going to be a massive threat to Google. So let's get into it on the podcast. The

The first thing that happened here is essentially they've released a new AI feature that can now summarize web pages. Right now, this is just rolling out on Android. I assume that they're going to be rolling this out other places, but you can imagine if something it's a web browser like Firefox or Chrome or Microsoft Edge, and you're seeing kind of these summary features from a bunch of different platforms. Now, the first one that you'll probably think about is like not necessarily Chrome, but Google does this when you, when you make a search, this is how they're doing their, their search engine.

And what's interesting to me though is that beyond just the search engine, this is getting baked straight into the browser. We're seeing something very similar out of Brave. If you use Braves, like the Brave search, it doesn't have to be on the Brave browser, but Brave is another popular browser. It does the same thing. It's got this kind of AI summarized webpage. Now, the reason that I think this is important is because I think this is a massive threat to Google's current way of doing data.

business. Now they've definitely tried to do something similar. When you do a search on Google, there's a little snippet that now appears at the top generated by AI. If you have like an account enabled with their AI features and it's going to summarize the results. The reason that I think this is important is I think we're going to start moving away from seeing these Google result pages that we're so used to for the last, you know, 15, 20 years that have been really popular. Um, things are changing and I think people don't want to search through, you

you know, 20 different blue links below to try to put together whatever piece of information or get whatever type of response they're looking for. And neither do they want to, after they've done that, go and click on an article and have to read, you know, five page article to get the piece of information that they're looking for. So I think the way we're doing search is completely changing and AI is going to be, you know, a massive disruptor. Now, why does this matter to Google? Google is making hundreds of billions

billions of dollars exclusively from that search process. It's kind of unfortunate because Google is the biggest person that benefits from the struggle of the search. They don't want to make the search too easy and literally just give you exactly what you want right off the bat necessarily, because if you do that, then you're not scrolling around, clicking on a bunch of different links and inevitably clicking on ads, which is where they make all of their money. So they're incentivized to show you ads, to show you a bunch of results and make you feel like you're on this

searching process. Even when they're like implementing these AI features, it feels like they're begrudgingly adding AI features in because they know open AI is going to kind of eat their lunch. So I think this is interesting because people are moving to tools like perplexity, like you.com, and they're essentially using them to just get, when you ask a question, it searches the web, it summarizes the web pages, it summarizes the results. It just gives you a snippet that gives you the exact information you want. That is what a user wants. They don't want to have to do this whole search process.

but there's no room in there necessarily for ads for clicking around. You just get the answer you get. Now you could like argue that, Oh, well maybe Google will do something clever. Like they'll have a, they'll have like ads embedded into the response. But if that's the case, people are going to move to all of the other platforms that do this for free, because why would you ever want an ad embedded in your response? It's, it's,

It's by definition, a biased response. You want an unbiased ad, you have a question, you just want to know what the actual answer is, not what someone's paying you to put the answer in. So all of this is really fascinating. When it comes to Opera, they have this AI product in their browser called Aria. And essentially this new feature they're doing, it can now, you know, summarize, you

the different pages on Android. I'll be curious to see if this launches on iOS as well, or if there's some sort of security issues there, because it's essentially reading what's on your screen and stuff, although it's on their browser and their app. So they might have the, you know, you might be able to grant them the permission to do that. What's really interesting to me is,

If you want to use this, you got to go, you can visit any text-based webpage, right? So this isn't going to be for like YouTube or something. There's three dots in the top corner. You can click on them and you can click summarize. And then essentially there's going to be a little pop, like a ARIA, their browser, their thing that pops up and you can request a summary of the page. Now,

Is this actually faster than reading the page? It seems kind of, I don't know, annoying to me to like have to click on something and request a summary and get it right. I think that these features are going to get built straight into what we're doing. I think whether it's this or something else, probably something like u.com or perplexity, you can see this is like they're building these features because users want them and users want them because it makes it so much easier than having to do all the research yourself. I think it probably is going to move away from a chat bot and, and

just be more of like, boom, it'll give you the response right away. Or maybe there'll be a setting where you can just enable to have this default summarize every webpage right when you load, or you don't even need to get to the webpage. It just does it, you know, when you do make the search. So whatever level of the funnel this happens, I think this is gonna be massively disruptive to Google and their ad business. This is

way better user experience for users. And I don't think Google has a real response on how they're going to be able to integrate ads into this. So as it is right now, it seems like they're just kind of slow rolling and putting off this inevitable doom as long as possible and just being like, oh, look, we have a little AI snippet at the top of Google results. Like, it's cool. You can use it, but they still have all the ads below. Like, they don't want to cannibalize their ad business.

Inevitably, I think these competitors, Perplexity, You.com, some of these features coming on these tools like Opera are going to cannibalize that or are essentially just going to compete away a lot of their margins. And Google is going to have a serious threat to their ad business in the coming years. If you enjoyed the episode today, it would mean the world to me if you could leave a review or a comment or subscribe on YouTube, follow us on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. And I will see you in the next episode.