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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly it. Google is trying to get people to stay on the pages they click, and they optimize for this behavior, not for utility or for quickly accessing information.

If you go to a page and immediately find what you are looking for, Google interprets that as failure.

This is why Bing and AI based search can completely beat Google web search, because they are trying to serve the searcher rather than serve ads.

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The problem AI search has is monetization, openAI can't run gpu server farms to serve 100M customers for free forever. This was a problem that plagued early google as well, sergey and larry were against using ads for monetization, but in the end that i what drove the business to profitability

I wonder if AI search could be sth consumers would happily pay a tiny bit for

They wouldn't pay for AI search, but might for AI that also searches.

I don't get where this "Everything must be free+ads' mentality comes from. Netflix thrived for a decade using subscriptions, Microsoft and Apple's businesses are primarily subscription based.

AIs are so extremely useful to some users, that they'll gladly pay $$ per month to use it. And the size of 'some' increases radically with each leap in AI's capabilities.

GPTs don't have to be gimped to just search. Even GPT-4 today with wolfram alpha can obliterate most low-level tutors. It will be a personal tutor, therapist, coding assistant, secretary, storyteller, entertainer all in one very soon. People will pay for it.

sth?

"Something", perhaps.

Yes :-)

AI search seems to have similar dynamics to traditional search. The people writing the stuff you’re searching for need to make money. (For example, AI doesn’t magically know about real-world events. It needs a human being to write about it.) Then the company offering the search product needs to make money too.

If you compensate sites for using their data in your AI product, then there will be the same incentives as now to game the system (AISEO?)

If you don’t compensate sites, then they’re not incentivized to produce the content that makes your search product useful.

…for now.

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