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Comment by moi2388 | Hacker News Reader

“He dismissed the notion that chatbots posed a threat to Google’s search business, which accounts for more than half of revenue at parent Alphabet Inc.”

That’s great. Between bookmarks and GPT, I haven’t done a Google search in over a month.

If I wanted to see ads I’d subscribe to Facebook.

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Google search has absolutely deteriorated to the point of being useless for me. The only valuable thing left from are walled gardens like Google Maps that contain curated information. The open web, or at least Google's understanding of it, is a wasteland.

Here's a concrete example of something I experienced just yesterday. Watched the excellent film "A touch of sin" and wanted to know about the background so I went on Google and started searching. I actually gave it a good try and gave up after 10 minutes. Asked ChatGPT and it gave me the perfect answer, zero shot:

My prompt:

The Chinese movie "A touch of sin" is based on four real-life events from chinese life, all random acts of violence. Can you provide the real-life events that were the basis for the movie? Only answer if you are confident that these were indeed the original events. Make sure this answer is based in news sources

ChatGPT-4:

"A Touch of Sin," directed by Jia Zhangke, is a 2013 Chinese film inspired by four real-life events that occurred in China. While the movie creatively adapts the stories, these are the actual events that served as its basis:

    * Zhou Kehua's crime spree (2010-2012): Zhou Kehua was a notorious serial killer and robber who targeted ATM users in several Chinese cities. He murdered at least 10 people and was eventually shot dead by the police in August 2012.

...

I'm leaving out the others but I double checked each one and they're all correct.

You mention that Google search is now useless for you. How did you double check what GPT-4 told you here?

I actually clicked through to the links GPT-4 provided (Guardian or SCMP articles)

When I tried your prompt in ChatGPT it gave inaccurate responses and fabricated links. I compared them to the real events described in the Plot section of the Wikipedia article of the movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Touch_of_Sin.

Is it because you used ChatGPT-4?

I do agree the answers are a little hard to find in the Wikipedia article. Although I also feel that writing a prompt like that takes a bit of time as well...

Yes, GPT3.5 gives pretty bad results. GPT-4 gives way better results

I find sometimes the only way to get good results for obscure movies like that is to search in the original language. For example, searching for “tian zhu ding” surfaces pretty good results for me. Also those real life events are listed on the wikipedia page at the bottom of the synopsis for each vignette. I’m obsessed with that movie, though. Good taste!

I’m sure Google must be feeling the heat by now, but we need to determine the percentage of non-tech users who are utilizing ChatGPT vis-a-vis Google search.

I started using gmail actively in 2008, in 2012 I think almost everyone who had an email, had a gmail account, maybe not as primary. By 2014 it was the norm for non tech users. It's not b2b and cost if switching for individual users is cheap. OpenAI showed they can do marketing, UI and scale. Search is Google’s golden goose, loosing 20-40% of market share in 5y span might be devastating.

But the main “attack” vector isn’t gonna be chatgpt replacing Google search or another search engine cannibalizing market, but rather search becoming obsolete, as tools become smarter. GPT plugins combined with good api, specialized models and maybe even local inference. Most of my searches are “how to do X in such and such library / tool / framework / etc.” When my tool, whether its IDE or Jupyter notebook or Photoshop can use few prompts to essentially do what I mean, I don’t need to search the internet. And then Google PMs can dwell 24/7 on diminishing metrics of MAUs and DAUs, wondering why they are loosing to other search engine or chatgpt, when in fact they are losing to the next generation UI.

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