Last I looked ChatGPT is a loss leader, so users might love it, but the judge is still out if people are willing to pay what it actually costs to produce the experience. It seems Google is betting on an ad-supported ChatGPT experience, which seems like the natural step to keep up.
But then there's the data side to all of this. Case in point, this Google search, https://www.google.com/search?q=chatgpt+losses, awesome I got a snippet and didn't have to sift through a bunch of sites to get the $540 million figure. Great, but who fed this data to Google ? Many sites of course, and what's their incentive ? To make money through ad clicks & sign-ups or some other form, so what's their incentive going to be now if Google keeps users to themselves like ChatGPT ?
There's going to be little to no incentive for news orgs, consultants, developers, cooks, trainers, you name it, to publish the most recent story/analysis/algorithm/recipes. If the data is going be commoditized by Google/ChatGPT or whoever, they will need to feed/pay for the most recent data themselves.
Couldn't agree more. These days i rarely search outside of a few sites because it's a chore to determine if a blog/site is meaningfully real, or if it's just SEO spam copied from something else. If i'm searching for a product i rarely leave `site:reddit.com` for this exact reason.
It would definitely be nice to "go to sites" again but these days i just don't.
Ironically, If AI mitigates me having to filter out SEO spam myself i could actually see myself going to more random sites than i do currently. Ie if, like in Phind, a search result was deemed by "the AI" to be useful, and assuming i trust "the AI", i'm more likely to go to it rather than talk to the bot about it.
I'm not saying that AI can or should solve this problem. I'm just saying the web as it stands now is garbage to me personally and filtering out the garbage represents a significant hurdle i deal with at the moment. Anything that solves that is of interest to me.