Neural Search Frameworks: A Head-to-Head Comparison

The two things they've got keeping people on their ad product are search and (hypothetically) anti-competitive practices that may be hit by antitrust judgments.

If Google looses search ad revenue, the company is going to be put in a very precarious position where a lot of their scale and largesse becomes difficult, if not impossible, to maintain.

Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft have a healthy mix of revenue streams. Google does not. For Google, the entire story revolves around search ad revenue.

All Apple needs to do is switch to using Bing. An antitrust judgment against Chrome by default on Android opens the door for alternative browsers and search engines. And a judgment against Google search by default on Chrome sinks the ship altogether. Both the EU and the US are looking into this, and I wouldn't be surprised if one or more of these things happens in 2023.

Google search quite frankly sucks. A lot of this is spam at scale, but there are also increasingly perverse incentives that keep Google from delivering an S-tier product. They make their money diverting your attention to the highest bidder.

There are so many search startups getting off the ground now. The new breed of search is going to leverage AI/ML to do better than anything that came before. Paul Graham identified this as a promising attack surface, and he's totally right.

This is incredibly good opportunity for startups. Not just search, but anything else that might chip away at a Google product that they don't really care about. That they might not be able to afford when their core revenue stream begins to falter.