Bing Gained Less Than 1% Market Share Since Adding Bing Chat

A friend who grew up in the worst rural schools, still lives in mobile home 2.5 hours from the nearest major city, driving 35 minutes through the country to their restaurant job in their grandmothers car, while taking care of the 3-year old kid they had when they were 18 while co-parenting with their divorced husband, while dealing with felony drug charges, and makes <$1,500/month has absolutely grokked the realities of ChatGPT and Midjourney without me mentioning anything about it to them. Instagram and TikTok expose people to these trends and mobile apps with free accounts open up immediate exploration to the masses.

Two friends who are 35 year old mostly-unemployed interior designers with an anthropology degree and no college degree are using it for drafting quotes.

Every lawyer, MBB consultant, and computer programmer I know either uses them heavily or are aware of colleagues who do.

I tutor a ton of students at a mid-tier state school, every single student I know in high school or university are using ChatGPT for their schoolwork.

And the 5-7 year olds I know have much worse typing skills than I had at that age, because they use Siri to do 90% of the things on their phone/tablets. It annoys the shit out of me because it looks so painful and the noise of them talking to their phone is obnoxious, but I can absolutely see the paradigm changing to where the youngest generation might not even use keyboards for their first choice as a computing interface. Powerful LLM's will greatly improve their interaction with Siri.

Are pinterest, quora and google relying on the ads business model? Sure. OpenAI? Not so much. They have the users actually paying for the service.

One commenter says everyone under 30 has a paid chatgpt account, yet chatgpt as a self reported user base of 185 millions, with only 100 millions unique active user per week, a far cry from every people under 30 with a spare 20$.

Even if every single one of these people installed bing on all their devices it wouldn't make a dent... chrome is used by more than 3b people.

I took a bet last year on this very forum about how chatgpt wouldn't become anywhere to what the HN prophets promised, I can take another bet for 2025 lmao

https://www.demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/543218/worldwide-interne...

I acknowledge that it is a paid service, but you haven't tried Kagi yet you should give it a go! Default Search quality is very good, with no ads, tracking, or telemetry, and you can use Lenses and customizations to get even better results. You can even block certain sites from appearing in search (or simply de-rank them), which has dramatically reduced Pinterest and other SEO spam for me.

Compared to what the user wanted when they ran the search in the first place.

> It’s not as though I can jump over to DuckDuckGo or Bing and my search quality radically increases. Usually the opposite.

Of course it's a personal anecdote but as a DDG user since 2014 I routinely add !g to my search when the results don't satisfy me (which happen every once in a while, say once a month). This used to help, as most of the time Google had the answer I was looking for and could not find otherwise, but I don't think it happened even once over the past two years: Google is now at least as bad as DDG when it used to be strongly superior.

And I think they're right. More and more information on the internet is siloed into apps or behind paywalls. Knowledgeable people who used to write technical articles now make youtube videos (far less searchable). And the good stuff on the internet is diluted with low quality content written by someone who has to churn out an article every 15 minutes that is hard to filter out, even as a human. (I wasted 3 hours yesterday because a website gave me the wrong formula for something)

> Alas, Google actually fixed this and quickly displays the man’s actual height now.

That's really the only thing I want: A search engine that understands my queries. I don't want to chat with a computer.

Recipes are the classic example. Because Google upranks sites that people spend more time on after a click, most recipe searches yield pages that start with the history of flour milling and what milk is, before eventually getting to the desired recipe 5000 words later.

It was more temporary (shorter time period) than you probably realize.

I was a developer on the Google web indexing system. PageRank was only one of many signals that went into ranking, and PageRank was gamed by link farms pretty early. There's a whole team dedicated to fighting webspam, and their spam signals are some of the other inputs to the scorer.

By Google's golden years, there was a whole lot of secret sauce going into fighting webspam, and PageRank had been pretty thoroughly gamed.

PageRank was important, but I think its importance is generally over-estimated.

Also, about 15 years ago, Google was testing another link-graph-based metric that was more efficient to calculate and less susceptible to linkfarms. I imagine PageRank (as described in the patent/Wikipedia) has been replaced, though perhaps the new algorithm is still referred to as PageRank. (IIRC, the proposed replacement was being called PageRankNG while in testing.)

They can answer a lot of questions in a lot of ways that Google just cannot.

- Im sure there’s talented professional behind anything that is good and the accident is their decisions surviving the corporate gauntlet of enshitification or expnanding the scope of the project such that it becomes an unpleasant mess, probably obnoxious too.