They should be freaking out. Google is overwhelmingly dependent on a single revenue stream and AI like ChatGPT is a serious threat to their dominant position.
Not to mention, Google has spent a decade using their defacto monopoly as leverage and optimizing for ads and clicks, often exploiting their own users in the process. The bar for better was lower than it should have been, and the market is hungry for an alternative. Google has some real challenging times ahead.
Yes this is the most insane thing about GOOG to me. Yes, search is basically monopoly moat of recurring growing revenue. On the other hand, they've spent not a decade, but about 25 years betting this would remain the case!
I've met a lot of people who work at GOOG, and yet none of them could explain to me how the thing they work on makes any money for GOOG. In fact, most went out of their way to volunteer to me that they only work on R&D/moonshot/non-revenue generating activities.. proudly. Quite a large subset of them showed almost an embarrassment of the single revenue stream (tricking old people to click on Pharma ads instead of genuine search results), and actively distanced themselves from it as some sort of moral shield.
It is amazing to have that many smart people working for that long and not bother to find some other ways to make money. Just complete lack of focus.
> not bother to find some other ways to make money.
Oh, they definitely tried, and still try. The problem is the same as many large companies: they want a new trick as lucrative as the old trick, and there aren't any.
Having run "startup within the enterprise" business units ... this is such a frustrating thing, trying something new and different, but it doesn't become massively profitable in under a year, so the owner/founder shuts the project down. Not remembering it took the main business unit over a decade to get where they are :-/
They don't nurture any new tricks long enough to actually prove it out. Their product graveyard is like the SV equivalent to the city of Colma. From Wikipedia: "With most of Colma's land dedicated to cemeteries, the population of the dead—not specifically known but speculated to be around 1.5 million—outnumbers that of the living by a ratio of nearly a thousand to one. This has led to Colma being called "the City of the Silent" and has given rise to a humorous motto, formerly featured on the city's website: "It's great to be alive in Colma""
Most real enterprise still happens on Office, and lots of consumers happy give Apple $100/year for iCloud.
Cloud services - aren't they basically 3rd behind AMZN/MSFT now, by A LOT? They are basically competing for 3rd against IBM/Oracle/etc, and some quarters they are #4.
I mean, once you are past the free tier.. GSuite is close to the monthly cost of Office365, and Google sheets is not even close to Excel. You can basically program mini applications in Excel vs a basic spreadsheet app for medium sized spreadsheets that multiple people can edit in their browser with version tracking.
I have Excel, and of course Sheets. I actually find Excel to be too full of features (same with Word). It's just too hard to figure out a simple thing like having the top row be column headings (yes, I do know how to do it, but it was not immediately apparent).
"Someone, somewhere, might want to do this, so let's put it in" is obviously what's happened with Office for 30 years now.
Exactly. Every release some PM or senior engineers wants to add some features, for no doubt good reasons, and it all gets shoehorned into the UI. Thus the rule I generally espouse, of
"Simple things should be simple. Complicated things should be possible."
My summary view of much of Microsoft, and more of tech, is that, while a lot of the software is really good, too often the corresponging explanations and documentation are not.
There seems to be a theme that the user should learn to use the software via experimentation. To me, that too often results in too much clicking, and when finally I do see I take notes, i.e., document some of the software.
They're still trying; really really hard. But they are just not good enough.
Maybe like Zuck they are / were a one trick pony. Perhaps becoming a multi billionaire is not proof that you can invent and monetize something anytime anywhere in any industry on demand.
I think in some ways its the scale of the problems Google X / Other Bets / Alphabet went after being rather hyperbolic.
Apple / Microsoft just take what they are good at to move into adjacent spaces in consumer/office tech. Apple has made some failed forays into corporate while Microsoft has not done terrible well in consumer other than gaming and maintaining their existing Windows base.
I wonder if Apple leaks about stupid stuff we never see like their car and their AR is just to put other less well disciplined firms onto the trail of expensive dead ends.
If you think of automakers and their "concept car" approach in which they present beautiful improbable vehicles they never ship..
Apple seems to LEAK "concept cars" they never ever preview, while Google goes all-in trying to actually ship a "concept car" no one wants, like Google glass.
Apple is the result of judicious application of the word "no".
Google looks like a lot of "yes" with weak knees that quickly turn into "no".
I still don't understand what Google's strategy is in almost any space - messaging, social, home automation, audio, AR/VR, other than "yes... actually, no".
> A good analysis of Apple: capture the news cycle with your whiz bang thingie, and then forget about it.
I kind of don't agree there. Apple really only officially announces, demos and talks about products they have to sell you right now.
About the only vaporware I can remember from them in the last decade was that stupid dual charging puck thing they just quietly walked back from.
The only released & quietly abandoned product in recent memory would be the iPod Hi-Fi dock boombox thing.
So when Apple announces something I'm 99% confident it will make it will be released within days/weeks. And when it is released, I'm 95% confident the product line will exist in 5 years.
Google, for me, those numbers are like 70% & 20%. Which is why I rarely waste my time to look at anything new from them. Odds are its either not something I need, or if I need it.. won't be long for this world, so why bother.
I think they clearly feed rumors to journalists about stuff that is further back in the development pipeline, to the point that the conspirational minded might think its to throw off competitor from the right course..
iCloud is funny because it's just storage and an e-mail address compared to GSuite which can be actually used to do a bunch of hobby level stuff.
ChatGPT AI is overhyped, just like full self driving was five years ago. Yes, it can do stuff, write articles, code etc. until people realize that what it spits out is useful stuff mixed with made up gibberish and has to be checked by a human. It's going to be just great for ad spam and propaganda though.
Yes, its funny when people post what is obviously cherry picked examples of it working.
So far the code I've seen is the same level of word salad as its text writing.
I gave it some really easy ones that it responded back with 1-liners that would produce runtime errors, let alone actually produce correct result.
I find it interesting since its really just synethesizing new content from existing content it has trained on, yet it produced simple one-liners that were wrong.
It’s tricky - companies with high margin businesses are loath to scale into low margin businesses. It makes the firm look more like a commodity than it is. Meanwhile startups in large enterprises are often desperate to grow revenue to show relevance.. leading to low margins.
It just seems like they wasted their lead, margin and talent.
Bell Labs produced a lot of interesting stuff with their monopoly profits.
Apple R&D seems to come up with lots of interesting new product lines.
GOOG bought Nest and managed to become an also-ran in home automation.
GOOG other bets might produce something with Waymo, but when.. all this autonomous car stuff is continuously 5 more years, every year. That's about the closest they've come so far, no?
This isn't right. In the real world every effort saps a little bandwidth from the CEO/top execs, potentially harms the brand, potentially causes the org to calcify. Better off handing the money back.
My friend Jerry and I explored this topic in detail using Xerox PARC as an example [1]
I think Walter is right that spin-off is the right strategy, and (not very well known) Xerox actually did do that with a lot of PARC innovations. Just not with computers.
Yeah I'm saying that what appears to be a 14% return won't be, and/or creates risks. Putting small amounts of capital to work to earn 14% is a distraction for Google. The distraction has the potential to cost 100's of billions.
> The distraction has the potential to cost 100's of billions.
Not doing this has the potential for Google to miss the next technology trend, potentially crashing Google completely.
That being said, I completely agree with you on a different note. "Professional" spectator sports in schools and higher education. In my opinion, it should be completely banned. Every single such initiative distracts from a school's or university's core mission. It does not matter if each dollar they spent on it makes back ninety cents or two dollars. It is still a distraction that everyone has to do because everyone else is doing it.
Further to this - they not only want it, but they kind of need it if it's to move the needle. It's a difficult situation. A nice problem to have for sure, but still difficult.
Why should they find another way to make money? Think about it from the shareholder's perspective: As an investor, I chose to put my money into an ad distribution company. I know this business has a finite end, and I'm okay with that. I'm gambling that I'll get more money between now and when they close up to give me a good enough return.
If I want to invest in an X or Y, then I will do that. In fact I am well diversified into hundreds of other companies anyway. But I don't want my ad distribution investment clouded or diluted with cars, AI, balloons, or anything else.
Let a business be good at one thing (possibly closely adjacent things), and live as long as that's a valuable contribution to society, then close the doors.
It's the execs that want to diversify into other areas, because this is what keeps them in the game longer. If the business they are currently running winds down, that may not be good for them.
at least in the tech side of things, they decided to hire the same type of person, uncreatives who memorize leetcode questions and have no ability to think outside of that box.
memorize leetcode, regurgitate
memorize system design, regurgitate.
There are no room for creatives with that process.
It seemed like Google's hiring filters were about what a Stanford student might think is important (that socioeconomic class, had learned what Stanford students do, thinks whatever they don't know is less important or follows naturally from what they know, preferably recent grad (again, student thinking), with affluent lifestyle expectations, etc.).
Wall Street, OTOH, is about making money. They might also not fully know how to hire the people they want, but it seemed they valued scrappy more, especially when it leads to real results (which are maybe easier for them to see, when it can be pretty directly quantified in dollars).
(Though the Wall Street recruiter I talked with, back 2 decades ago, when I first wanted to work for Google, did ask about my GPA. So I told them I had a perfect GPA, like most of the other students in that grad program, and that that wouldn't tell them much about someone's potential. Then I told them I didn't really want to work on Wall Street, which had a bad reputation from the preceding decade, though the $400K to start was maybe 10x what I was making at the time. Then Google gave me some asinine brogrammer student nonsense in the interview, before that was a thing, and before wannabe companies mimicked it. So I ended up going to neither company.)
I graduated between dotbomb & GFC, so my dad was convinced programmers would never have jobs again. Further, Silicon Valley was not exactly top of the list for me given the preceding crash. Finally, if you wanted to stay on east coast in late 90s/early 00s in tech, there wasn't a lot of choice outside Wall St.
If the "Google other" revenue is $25 billions, how many unicorns is that?
As for what googlers told you, keep in mind that they are pretty loyal - they have that Lamda chatbot as if an employee perk, and only one of them leaked a sample.
$25B is 1/2 the revenue of Apple "wearables and accessories or 1/3 the revenue of Apple "services".
$25B is also less than what Amazon now makes on ads, which should especially given Google pause. Consider that Amazon started as simply an online retailer and has successfully spun up other business lines that now account for 50% of revenue across online fulfillment / 3rd party services, physical stores, subscription services, ads, cloud, etc. 4 of these are bigger than "google other".
Sure, big absolute number, but trivial as a percent of a FAANG scale company revenue.
Apple & Amazon have no one product category making up more than 50% of revenue. Meaning they can take some serious pain on any product category and it not be fatal. This also means that they have staff distributed across a wide variety of product lines.
Google has 7x the staff they did in 2009. This seems like a precarious position to be in during this part of the cycle. I can imagine them coming under serious scrutiny to allocate resources appropriately if say, only 20% of staff are responsible for 90% of revenue. If you can't grow the top line, you can certainly grow the bottom line..
Amazon makes more on shopping ads than google now. You could say google is no longer in first position for shopping search.
Reddit is chipping away the Q&A search, but time will tell if it has a similar downfall to quora/yahoo-answers.
I’ve seen TikTok lead in educational search, cooking, gardening etc. TikTok could potentially overtake YouTube all together over next 5-10years.
Google maps isn’t as far ahead as it once was. Apple caught up.
Then you got Microsoft whos teams and office suite whicj caught up and surpassed google’s office products (for what enterprise buyers care on)
Leaving what. GCP as their only disruptive marketshare product area? And GCP while high margin isn’t nearly as high margin as their ads businesses. For GCP to be profitable they need to severely cut wages for cost center roles. A PgM in GCP shouldn’t be making 300k when AWS and Azure spend just 200k on the same role.
Finally you’ve got the money pit of waymo, X, and the bets. All of them have neither a real path to profitability nor compelling return on investment.
Id say the investors are right. Google is the new IBM, return profits to shareholders so they can invest them in more fruitful endeavors.
I think Google Maps is already losing. I was a faithful user since it came out. Game Apple Maps a few tries but always went back.
The past couple of years Google maps has gotten more glitchy, given worse directions, and most recently started showing extreme lag. Maps in CarPlay started falling behind real-time. First by a few seconds, then by minutes. Wasn’t sure if it was the car head unit, phone, reception or what.
Out of desperation I tried Apple Maps. Not only did it work flawlessly, but its driving prompts are greatly superior to Google maps.
I could go on about YouTube having broken bulk-publishing of videos (this for my son’s football and basketball games chopped up into indivuap videos).
Google Maps is unequivocally the champion in terms of reviews, and this is what really matters when it comes to actually finding places to go.
Not just that, but it's directly monetizable because if the user journey starts with a Google Maps search query, e.g. "lunch near me", those first few results are worth real money.
Apple Maps leverages yelp for reviews which is a better dataset than google reviews.
And just like above said, google is optimizing for ad revenue not user experience. This opens the door for a competitor to swoop in and offer better results.
Well I'd say they both put all their eggs in one basket & let that basket deteriorate. Show of hands - people who feel google search has improved in the last 5/10 years vs people who feel it's gotten demonstrably worse?
So they have a monopoly product that is something like a 2 sided market (advertisers & search users) where both sides hate using it..
Show of hands - people who feel google search has improved in the last 5/10 years vs people who feel it's gotten demonstrably worse?
Google's unwillingness to show any results older than Taylor Swift' last breakup song made me switch to DuckDuckGo.
It was a bit rough at first, but in time Duck turned out to be just as good as Google, and sometimes better for the sorts of thing I search for.
Then, about four or five months ago, something happened to Duck, and it's gotten significantly worse. Short lists of results. More results that are off-topic than on. In the last couple of weeks, for me it's as bad as Google was before.
I'll stick with Duck because it's not trying to harvest every morsel of my life to make a quick buck. But I wonder if anyone else has noticed a very quick and very significant change in quality with their DuckDuckGo results?
Brave search has been surprisingly good for me. I actually had it find me something Google was failing to find for the first time yesterday. Normally I have to occasionally try a Google search for nuanced topics, but this time it was the opposite.
It autosuggests and I don't even have to click on links half the time anymore. I'd call that progress. Not ground shaking like ChatGPT but half the time I get the (right) answer to my question just by typing some related words into the search bar.
I don't know how many Google searches I did yesterday, but it feels like a lot.
It does has problems with certain queries beyond a certain depth, which I also get frustrated with, but I can go from having forgotten calculus to integrating by parts with the help of Google.
>Show of hands - people who feel google search has improved in the last 5/10 years vs people who feel it's gotten demonstrably worse?
I mean, personally I think this is very likely true. My feeling is that it's the web itself which has gotten demonstrably worse. Diagnosing the reasons for that is a more interesting problem.
> My feeling is that it's the web itself which has gotten demonstrably worse. Diagnosing the reasons for that is a more interesting problem.
I think it’s a little tricky separating the two since Google has so much influence over the web. A lot of the parts of the web which have gotten worse were due to decisions they made to do things like cut ad revenue for normal organic content, declining to punish or even rewarding blackhat SEO, pushing AMP, shuttering Reader, etc. That sold a lot of ads at the time and people said it was needed to counter Facebook but it’s left them more vulnerable now.
That's right- Larry wanted a question-answering machine. Larry and Sergey "got bored of search" (I heard this from the engs who were going to weekly presentations to show new search features) when they felt it was just chasing a larger index and showing people what they wanted to click on.
Meanwhile I long for the days where this was Google's focus. I want a better index of the web and I want the search engine to give me the tools to filter out the garbage I don't want. The fact that this isn't a feature tells you everything you need to know about Google's real priority: it's not us, it's the advertisers.
I have more respect for the Wall Streeters: at least they're honest and don't go around pretending they're saving the world with their latest compiles-to-Javascript.
Most people, if they were honest, would admit they work to make money to have a life.
SV has a strong tilt towards pretending whatever BS get rich quick scheme of ad / VC supported is saving the world. It's weird watching it from the outside and imagine the other path not taken.
In 20 years we may look back at social media, smartphones, the whole PII data based economy with its recommendation algo rage loops as our generations Big Tobacco.
I don’t know but Google is very bad at releasing and maintaining products they already have a horrible reputation. They could have done better but I guess no one gives a flying f when the money is still coming.
Google did more than search: gmail, youtube, docs, cloud and that’s just stuff on top of my mind.
The non-ad moat that I see them losing is if slack gets into the office app game. so instead of editing a Google doc and sending the link in slack, you just edit it inside slack.
they spent years as well polishing their tools like google mail, docs, search and etc.. so i guess they still have a lot of enterprise or paid users, paying for their services.
Actually the numbers are quite impressive[0]:
"The global G suite business software market is expected to grow from US$ 2,224.76 million in 2021 to US$ 3,903.72 million by 2028; it is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 8.4% during 2021-2028. G suite provides professional services with productivity tools to stay connected and organized to meet the clients' needs.4 Apr 2022"
Not only are the numbers impressive, the tools are impressive too.
But that doesn't change the reality that ad revenue related to search is the lion's share of Google's revenue. That makes them exceptionally vulnerable for a company of their size and breadth. And in that vulnerable area, anecdotally at least, the search quality feels as if it has regressed over the years.
Google was once the gateway to the web. Now they are the gatekeepers of the web.
Maybe I'm just nostalgic. Maybe things were never as good as I imagined they were. Maybe my expectations are unfair. But the Google of my memory was innovative. It delighted. That feels far removed from the Google of today.
You're not. It was so much better up until 2018. Now it only indexing spam blogs And ai generated contents? Search quality is so bad today that duckduckgo is performing actually better in many cases, especially software development related queries
DDG used Bing's index. "Search is so bad that" another trillion dollar corporation, which has been caught copying Google's search results, sometimes returns better results for niche queries, isn't much of an indictment.
yup, but that would be a great way to google if they want to move away from ads. Years of software engineering in great apps, integrations, google maps, etc.. that's can for sure generate more $ if, they invest more time on that, but I agree that will never beat the ads machine.
People have been incredibly shallow on the issue. ChatGPT is the harbinger. There will be many more and from different companies. Google awoke to find an enemy scouting party testing their perimeter.
Before it got choked off I had started using chatGPT for all of my searches. For code examples it blows google out of the water. For learning esoteric things (like congressional procedures etc.) quickly, it is without peer.
I think Google's founders offered their take years ago...no one listened then.
ChatGPT is only "truthy", however. The algorithm will happily give you information that sounds true, but is actually wrong. And if it's wrong even 1% of time, you will still need some way to verify its claims.
This sounds like experts criticizing Wikipedia, before it dominated. Mostly true and mostly accurate information is useful beyond what we normally think.
Remember how people use to criticize the newspapers? They'd say they read an article on a subject they new something about and were shocked at how bad it was. Then they'd conclude that the rest of the news was just as bad. What wasn't acknowledged was the utility of having imperfect information.
While I use ChatGPT myself, its ability to invent true-seeming information is insidious.
One of the early popular examples was asking ChatGPT what the downsides are of generics in TypeScript, and it cited that they're not compatible with some browsers/runtimes. It's entirely believable, but entirely wrong, and actually quite hard to confirm either way with internet searches. It's the sort of thing people would readily believe and pass around, though.
Similarly, when I was trying to concatenate video in ffmpeg, it produced convincing-seeming command lines, almost none of which worked properly, but almost all of which used actual ffmpeg command line parameters with appropriate-seeming formats and names. I wasted significant time on debugging those before realising quite how wrong ChatGPT was.
> What wasn't acknowledged was the utility of having imperfect information.
That's an interesting take, and one I haven't heard before. My main squeamishness with bad journalism, and even worse, with chat gpt, is not truth-content, but rather sourcing.
If you know the source, you can account for its biases, or, your reader can do so. As such, well-sourced quotes of complete nonsense tend towards adding to the sum total of truth in the world, because it was true that somebody said it, and their perspective is part of what's interesting in whatever event you're discussing.
If you scrub the data of its sources (like journalists do routinely, and chatgpt does by necessity) important information is lost.
Anyone criticizing ChatGPT now isn't thinking about what's possible with GPT-4 or GPT-5 when lots of research has gone into getting it to be better with answering accuracy. It doesn't take too much of an imagination to see a path where people aren't doing nearly as many searches on a search engine and just asking questions to something like ChatGPT.
The only thing that matters to me is overall usefulness. If I had access to a practitioner of a craft to teach me, and they mostly lead me in the right direction but also had some dumb ideas and incorrect practices. Well I would still want to learn from that person and expect my self to be critical and improve on the work of my teacher.
As long as ChatGPT assists me more than it harms me it is quite powerful simply due to the number of different things it can assist me with, and the raw scalability.
From a user experience perspective it's interesting that it may be a worse experience to get a set of links and have to pick from them and use cognitive effort to discern which sources are reliable, than to simply use ChatGPT and get an answer. But this step is precisely where verification happens.
I didn't suggest that people are good at making that effort. They arent. But the irony is that it's precisely in that difficulty that the act of verification lies. The fact that it's so difficult that it's not at all an efficient method for discernment suggests that it's either done on purpose or Google's UI is just not good for that purpose, or both.
At least with traditional search results, there are some indicia of their trustworthiness: does the author/outlet have a history of deception, are their assertions well-sourced, etc. With a chatbot result, it's effectively a black box.
Proving statements reasonably true is a lot easier than coming up with them from scratch. ChatGPT finds the needle in a haystack, you're job is to check it is a needle. For some questions it mostly returns junk but it returns needles often enough to speed up whatever you were doing.
Sadly, so is Google. I've been searching for advanced Blender topics yesterday and even with 20-30 tries at writing a search phrase I just got a lot of the same ****.
So are google search results. You have a few really good resources, and many listicles paraphrasing them. With Google completely ignoring the keywords you typed, you end up with a lot of the latter.
Agree with everything you said, but I want to dig into why I don't find the critique compelling.
In short, I see a need for us all to inherently distrust anything single thing we read -- everything needs to be verified and checked out across multiple (hopefully diverse) sources of information before it can be considered "truth" in any sense. I do develop trust in certain sources over time, but meta-sources like an AI or a search engine don't get this treatment because their scope is too broad. As an example, I tend to trust folks like Fabien Sanglard[0], Eric Goldman[1], and Adam Langley[2].
Example: over on the Morrowind subreddit a few years ago, an artist had been painting landscapes of the game "Morrowind" (oil on canvas, IIRC), and when he went to print them as posters to sell to fans, the site he wanted to print them on warned him that printing his own paintings of vistas from Morrowind was copyright infringement (it's not). He came to the Morrowind subreddit for help because he'd been actively misled.
Sites like plagiarism.org[3] confidently say false things:
> But can words and ideas really be stolen?
> According to U.S. law, the answer is yes. The expression of original ideas is considered intellectual property and is protected by copyright laws, just like original inventions. Almost all forms of expression fall under copyright protection as long as they are recorded in some way (such as a book or a computer file).
This is confidently incorrect in a couple of different ways. It might seem like incompetence (and may be), but it's worth noting that plagiarism.org is actually run by TurnItIn, which profits from people not really understanding how copyright works.
Similar example (I tend to look into copyright, trademark, and patent issues a lot): I got into a discussion with another HNer about IP law, and they cited an article written by an actual lawyer[4] on a site called "The National Law Review" that's simply wrong about IP law to defend their position. It's tragic, because we've built this sort of cargo cult around "citation, please?" but then all-too-often don't keep our critical thinking skills engaged as we evaluate the source.
This is true all over. I've read HN daily for more than 10 years. Not only does every comment need scrutiny (even if stated confidently), but most stories linked on the front page do as well. It's not just blog posts or opinion pieces; some scientific studies that are posted get torn apart in the comments, to enough of a degree that, after cross-checking, I tend to think the study itself is deeply flawed.
And there are numerous stories about how Google's Quick Answers confidently give the wrong answer, as highlighted in 2017 by the WSJ[5].
I'm not saying accuracy doesn't matter, but I feel the "ChatGPT is confidently wrong" needs more context or comparative analysis around it before it becomes a compelling argument, since "confidently wrong" applies to search engines and humans as well. I haven't seen any in-depth studies on this, but would love to.
"Similar example (I tend to look into copyright, trademark, and patent issues a lot): I got into a discussion with another HNer about IP law, and they cited an article written by an actual lawyer[4] on a site called "The National Law Review" that's simply wrong about IP law to defend their position"
The problem with "citation, please" is it only works if the person you are engaging with is acting in good faith.
If I type in "Can intellectual property rights expire if not litigated?" That web site (national law review) doesn't appear in the top 10 results. So I'd question where did they get that link?
Not so long ago I got in a debate with someone here whether muscle exercises can lead to long term increases in testosterone levels.
The person I debated with provided a link to an abstract of a study that didn't look quite right. There was no link to the actual study.
Instead of engaging with them I confirmed that, within a minute or two, I was able to locate a high quality, free to read, medical literature review on the topic.
Maybe my ability to type keywords into a search engine is superior, but instead I came to the conclusion the other poster was half assedly looking for search results to "win the argument" rather than engaging due to intellectual curiosity.
Absolutely agreed. I see so much bullcrap being peddled by people on hackernews and reddit it's absolutely maddening. People hide behind having a source like it's an immovable shield that protects them against having to perform their own critical thinking.
If they adopted chatgpt, you wouldn’t get the ads to links and their entire monetization strategy would need to change. I’m sure many at google brought up the technology as disruptive but leadership didn’t want to take the revenue hit.
It’s a common challenge and similar to why Amazon was so successful at disrupting retail. Retailers could have competed, but not without huge hits to profitability which shareholders would never get behind.
I am claiming google always provides the best results but that ChstGPT many times gives completely incorrect answers for which the right answer is found in the first result of a simple google search.
I honestly think this is the start of a long demise and one day we will look back and marvel at how big they used to be. It's not something I look forward to though considering the masses of personal private data they have amassed from their users.
This is old myth. 40% their revenue now comes from other properties such as YouTube, gmail, GCP, Android, maps etc. They are fairly comparable in diversification for rest of the big tech but still little way to go.
Not to mention, Google has spent a decade using their defacto monopoly as leverage and optimizing for ads and clicks, often exploiting their own users in the process. The bar for better was lower than it should have been, and the market is hungry for an alternative. Google has some real challenging times ahead.