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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

What's Google's incentive to be "good" now?

They own the search market anyway, and the more time you waste on their platform searching for what you want to find, the more ads you see and the more money Google makes.

What else are those 97% people gonna do, "Google on Bing" instead?

So for them, being bad is actually more profitable than being good, meaning there's a conflict of interest between what Google provides and what their users want, but since there's basically no equivalent competition, they get away with it laughing all the way to the bank.

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> the more time you waste on their platform searching for what you want to find, the more ads you see and the more money Google makes.

That's not the only way - it's in their best interest to rank ad-laden pages higher. That's more ad-impressions, which is how they really make their money.

Lets say a user searches for $FOO. Why on earth would google return the most relevant result if that result is ad-free? They can return the second-most relevant result, and get impressions on both the search-result page and the page that the user sees when they navigate to the first result.

Google's Ads (in search) are more profitable for them than AdSense, their RTB platform ;-)

I would also assume they're largely not competitive with each other. Adwords ads are mostly valuable when they've got intent. I.E. I search "5g home internet" and it passes me off to Verizon or AT&T.

Searches that end you up on AdSense (or pages that could have AdSense) probably are much less likely to have intent. So instead they pass you off to something you will read so they can hit you with retargeted ads from the last time you searched with the intent of buying you something.

I am sure there's overlap, but probably not a lot.

You have to balance being good with maximizing profit. If you aren't good, your userbase will go elsewhere.

Where will they go when Android, Chrome, Safari and Firefox all default to Google and plenty of Edge users also switch to Google?

Due to the defaults it's the only search engine most people ever heard of. Think of Plato's cave allegory.

If all your life you've only used Google and never anything else, making it the ground truth for you, how would you know it's bad in order to motivate you to look elsewhere?

> Where will they go when Android, Chrome, Safari and Firefox all default to Google and plenty of Edge users also switch to Google?

LLMs

LLMs are still far away from the daily mainstream usage Google gets, and since all devices default to Google, and people never change those, they'll stay on Google and only occasionally switch to LLMs for more advanced tasks.

Honestly, I hate to jump on this bandwagon, but I was after some information to help my wife put together some notes on a topic; at first I was coming up with questions we could answer and I'd search for the answers/sources online;

I decided to first try ask an LLM, so I asked Bard some targeted questions and asked for sources, and had all of the answers I needed, conveniently bullet pointed within 3-4 minutes, and all I had to do was go and verify the sources, job done.

GPT4 is the only one I've used much but it really can be good as a Google alternative for certain kinds of questions. I wouldn't trust it for anything obscure and complicated though - if you ask it about something like competitive Pokemon, you'll just get a stream of confidently incorrect junk that any beginner could disprove. (Asking for sources does help this sometimes though.)

For sure, given Google being who they are, Bard is quite good at things like Kubernetes, Golang, things you'd expect a search engine to have indexed, etc.

I haven't used ChatGPT extensively so I can't make a comparison, but with the right questions, I've been able to get great answers to technical things I can't be bothered to look up by hand.

I've done the same for a handful of things I use to default to a search engine for.

My favorite is recipes.

The blog spam around recipes is notoriously bad and is a direct result of Google Search.

Using these LLMs, all I need to do is tell it what I'm looking for in general and it will give me an entire recipe with no extraneous information.

It can handle adding or removing ingredients, substitutions. It can adjust servings. It can flip the recipe to work in a slow cooker or pressure cooker.

I've even had some limited success where I list restrictions based on picky eaters in the house for creating longer meal plans. No search engine can compete with that.

There were apps designed around these use cases. I foresee these sort of nuanced and personalized interactions being a key to drawing people away from search engines.

Absolutely, these sort of things which have varied but somewhat straightforward solutions will excel.

I'm going to give it a go for recipes, because as you say, blog spam is a nightmare. My wife has a lot of cookery books which she likes for her style of cooking, but I'm a little more "ad-hoc".

> You have to balance being good with maximizing profit. If you aren't good, your userbase will go elsewhere.

When you have +95% of the market, you can merely be good enough that users don't leave.

In this case, until Google literally starts serving ads-only and links to other google products (Hi Chrome!), they are not going to lose any money.

I get what you're saying, but why hasn't a better search engine emerged yet?

Bing's AI shows some promise, but I can't find anything better than Google. DuckDuckGo is shit. Classic Bing is shit. Brave Search showed promise, but it's also full of spam and with a smaller index. Marginalia showed some promise for smaller websites, but it's small, too.

All of them are unusable for local searches, except for Google, which is where I need search most. That and searching for obscure programming-related error messages.

Kagi doesn't even use it's own index, you're basically paying for a UI making API calls to Bing and Google. How well does changing the ranking work anyway, if you don't have your own index?

I want to believe that if Google were more aligned with users, search would be better. But where is that better search engine to showcase it?

Do a poll on HN. I bet that the vast majority of users here still use Google's search, and you can't blame HN users of not knowing of alternatives.

If Google really keeps its market share due to their monopoly, where is that better option that's being ignored? Tell me and I'll jump on it.

I know it's been mentioned in this thread but Kagi is a gods damn breath of fresh air compared to the current public search engines. They had a short outage recently and having to go back to Google for 30 minutes was painful. I have no idea what their secret sauce is (likely just being different from Google's algo that's SSO'd to death is enough) but it's now the easiest $10 I spend a month.

>I get what you're saying, but why hasn't a better search engine emerged yet?

Although Moore's law brought down the price of hardware and information processing dramatically in the last 20 years, it is still fairly expensive to crawl the Web, index it and rank it. Hardware cost + engineering cost can escalate pretty quickly, unless you decide to have smaller index than major search engines but then users will complain that search results are not good enough.

Bing Deep Search is interesting.

That's what Microsoft was thinking when they, in practice, stopped developing Internet Explorer (after version 6). That didn't work out too well for them...

I thought the same thing and recently ran across perplexity mentioned in some random tweet. (I know I am late to the party) It blew me away, I use it as my primary search engine now for most things.

They're going to use ChatGPT, and guess what, Bing hosts that too, so yes, they are gonna Google on Bing. Bada bing, bada boom.

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