Comment by philsquared_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by philsquared_ | Hacker News Reader

The reality is that ChatGPT, while not yet advanced enough to surpass Google, is just the beginning... Prior to ChatGPT, it was difficult to imagine a world without Google's dominance. Now it is very clear that Google has a real threat.

It's not just about ChatGPT version 1. It's about the potential for chatbot technology to bypass Google altogether. While the answers provided by ChatGPT may not be perfect right now, what happens when they are close to perfect? Why would you use a traditional search engine when you can get the information you need in a far more efficient manner?

Google isn't at code red right now because of ChatGPT V1 but because of the next 10 years of chatbots.

For me, I have already changed my searching behavior for a quite a few (not all) queries .. A lot of my queries these days go ChatGPT -> Brave Search -> Google. Google being third down the list for me.

It's not yet. But it clearly shows the direction where search is going, and the ways in which we will likely ask for information.

Classical search enhanced with AI algorithms is probably not the future. And Google invested a lot in it. It's unlikely that Google will be fast at adapting (changing) their business model.

I think if anything we're at a crossroads. Natural language is great for some types of queries, but has its limits for others. Internet search engines have come to be used for a lot of different tasks, and a large part of Google's sticking power has been that it's at least decent at most of them. But that may also be a bit of a problem. Based on everything I've seen so far, it appears that the more conversational a search engine is, the worse it tends to become at the task search engines originally did (i.e. finding documents about a topic). We've also sort of started to perform all sorts of things through this medium of document-finding, that perhaps could be done differently. I think it does a disservice to both those other tasks and the usefulness of document-finding.

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