This September, Alibaba expects to introduce what it calls a “conversational sourcing engine” for the B2B e-commerce of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
According to Kuo Zhang, President of Alibaba.com, “traditional search engines evaluate web page importance through interlinking, credibility and ad spend.” The company’s service promises to trade the titles, descriptions, keywords and pictures used by those traditional engines for inputs consisting of “complex queries” or even “full documents” and deliver results in “natural language.”
It would seem, then, that Alibaba’s engine departs from standard search-engine operation, which is to compare search queries against an established, if ever-evolving, index of the internet, put together through the web crawling of bots and then ranked. However, the ranking will likely benefit the search company’s business, notably in advertising, and reflect its biases. Google is a case in point.
The other cost of hosting
The video-hosting company Rumble has filed two lawsuits in the US alleging, among other things, that “Google has monopolized the ad tech stack by buying companies up and down the chain, concurrently representing both ad buyers and sellers, while also running the exchange that connects those parties” – an arrangement that Rumble likens to “insider trading in financial markets.”
Rumble’s CEO, Chris Pavlovski, has, in addition, posted to X a snippet from a video in which the defendant’s former Vice President of Search Products, Marissa Mayer, explains that Google, at least back in 2007, was ranking its own products above those of competitors, regardless of online popularity.
Mayer was delivering a Google Tech Talk titled “Scaling Google for Every User.” In Pavlovski’s snippet she speaks of Google’s then-new Finance page, which it had begun to rank over the old standard, Yahoo Finance. He does not remark that this talk took place in October 2007, about a year after Google acquired YouTube. At about the 43-minute mark, Mayer says the following: “Google has been hesitant to be a content hoster or a content creator, because to the degree that we host content we ultimately have a monetary incentive to drive people to those pages if those pages have ads on [them].”
YouTube cost Google $1.65 billion. According to Alphabet’s latest annual report (page 32), YouTube ads brought in revenues of $31.5 billion in 2023.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves
China, the land of the social credit score, is perhaps not the place to seek a transparent search engine. As the Financial Times reported in January, the Chinese government – which runs that social credit system – has acquired shares in several of the country’s tech companies, among them Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance (TikTok’s owner), after levying “tough fines and sanctions” in a “campaign to rein in the country’s largest tech groups” – all of this after late 2020, when Jack Ma, Alibaba’s co-founder, delivered a speech that criticized China’s banks and regulators and seemingly got him yanked from the world stage for three months.
What Ma’s old company is promising, for now, is a B2B sourcing engine that will “integrate all e-commerce storefronts across the internet,” understand natural language, transform that language into “professional sourcing requests,” and “even predict sourcing needs and provide suggestions.”
Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group introduced a generative artificial intelligence (AI) toolkit called Aidge last November. It says the kit is used by some 500,000 merchants, and the API is approaching 50 million calls. The AI has been deployed in about 40 “e-commerce scenarios” (product-listing refinement, marketing, customer service, automation) and ended up raising “content quality, click-through rates, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction.” Thanks to a virtual try-on tool for apparel and AI customer service that never sleeps (or so the company believes), AliExpress Choice’s conversion rates from pre-sales inquiries rose by 29 percent in June.
Alibaba International’s AI business department, established in April, has so far amassed a staff of 100.
