Hacker News Reader

Comment by starbugs | Hacker News Reader

The market is changing. Many people now prefer not to even use search if they can help it, because it's got so messed up.

They now have to compete against ChatGPT and they are late in the game. To make things worse, their reputation suffered a great deal with techies who despise their whole image and are actively trying to "degoogle" their lives. This may well be the beginning of a slow downturn since these people have an influence on the tech choices made by more "normal" users.

What if it doesn't even matter if they can keep a dominant position of their search engine?

These antitrust cases appear to be just a sign of a much larger pile of trouble ahead for Google.

View on HN

Search also may have had a limited lifespan. When the internet started to become public search was used to find something to satisfy interests.

Now the internet has become homogenized to a point where outside forces are constantly telling individuals what where to go on the internet.

I use search for doing research and development which is different than shopping or socializing.

> Many people now prefer not to even use search if they can help it, because it's got so messed up.

According to what exactly? Journalist speculation?

It's just a logical consequence of search being convoluted with ads and content you aren't interested in (SEO). If your search query resembles anything close to a question, ChatGPT will outperform the plain old search results w.r.t. the time users have to invest to get to an answer or solution.

It's something I have experienced myself and observed in my surroundings, including many comments on HN that point to the same direction.

Please get out of your bubble. It doesn’t take much digging to figure out Google’s search traffic or revenue hasn’t gone down because of ChatGPT

> It doesn’t take much digging to figure out Google’s search traffic or revenue hasn’t gone down because of ChatGPT

Whilst I didn't say that it did, would you mind sharing some sources for your claim?

The quarterly earnings statements

> The quarterly earnings statements

That (Earnings Call 2023/Q2) says that “search and other” revenue rose to $42.63 billion, up slightly from last year.

Doesn't sound like a big growth story to me. Also it would be interesting to know what "other" means.

Where do you get the traffic numbers from?

> Please get out of your bubble.

Maybe you are in a bubble?

https://aibusiness.com/google/is-chatgpt-actually-hurting-go...

Again, doesn't say anything about traffic, just revenue.

Traffic would be interesting, because it's not that impacted by other factors such as inflation, recessions etc.

It's also important to note that search revenue is not positively impacted by organic searches, which I'd guess would be the majority of what ChatGPT replaces currently.

USD exchange rates affects the earning statements more than ChatGPT (which has about 1.5% queries of Google search iirc)

The quarterly earnings statement says something about, well, earnings. And earnings need not be directly linked to search traffic since Google has several revenue streams, also from other products and from selling data "wholesale." It is thus difficult to correlate earnings directly to search traffic.

As for the actual search traffic to Google, I can only refer to my own personal experience. I have certainly changed my habits after AI became mainstream, and as a consequence I now google a lot less. These days I will often hit up ChatGPT (or other AI services) instead of using Google, despite the "opinion" of ChatGPT perhaps being a little less accurate.

yup. Google stock keeps going up. no worries.

I wouldn’t go that far. Stock price is a trailing indicator [1]. RIMs stock was at its highest in 2006 right before the iPhone was introduced.

[1] yes I know that’s not technically true. I know it’s supppose to the present value of all future returns.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com