I think I've heard enough of how ChatGPT is better than Google Search. I'm interested in hearing from people in the know of how Google could use its very sizable and knowledgeable resources to compete with ChatGPT.
Google is already building a rival product. IIRC last year they showcased it during their hardware event. It is doing what ChatGPT does, but is targetted explicitly at answering questions and giving advice, instead of trying to converse. They said it wasn't ready at that point and likely they are facing exactly the same trouble ChatGPT does, e.g. the model confidently making stuff up.
I have no idea about the internals at google, but that seems to me a very likely direction to go. I could imagine AI generated answers as a first result in Google searches, with a promp for further user interactivity.
To be honest I am actually surprised that they got caught of guard by this. They have AI technology with similar capabilities to ChatGPT and I suspected they knew that people aren't interested in a wall of links to terrible websites, but actually want an answer to their question.
I would assume it’s quite difficult to keep making the same amount of ad money by having a ChatGPT competitor. If the AI can already answer most user questions, then no one will click on the ad. Maybe there could be a clever way to include an ad into the reply text but that will make it hard to include multiple ads - so overall there will be less money.