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Comment by itsoktocry | Hacker News Reader

Google is still a juggernaut BUT...

I don't think anyone here would claim competitor's "AI" isn't going to take a chunk of their search market, would they? Search quality was diminishing for the past few years as it is, but there was no real alternative. Now I'm using ChatGPT as much (or more) than Google. Almost everything about Google Search is mediocre.

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Superior technology is not enough to win. For the most part, people are happy with Google, it integrates well into all that various surfaces folks use, etc. ChatGPT had a lot of hype and seemed the closest to getting mind share to the point where it would affect search usage, but from what I can tell, it's not made a dent. Anecdotes from the bubble of technologists don't really speak to the wider trends anymore.

Things which are mediocre and still dominate their segments include: Toyota cars, Heinz ketchup, GoPro cameras, Microsoft Windows, etc. Brand loyalty, trust, and familiarity simply go further than you think.

Those of us Of A Certain Age™ would add VHS to that list in your second paragraph. BetaMax was better in almost every way and even had the Sony name behind it, but in the end it didn’t matter.

Assuming there's competition, doesn't dominating a market mean your product is the new mediocre? Competitors will try to compete on price but be low quality, compete on quality but be high priced, and you're in the sweet big middle spot?

I’ve mostly switched to Bard, which I find superior to ChatGPT. More nuanced for most of the questions and conversations I have and I especially appreciate them linking out to sources!

Search quality is diminishing because "the web" as a graph of hyperlinked text documents where any domain name is a priori equally likely to contain a gem of information you're looking for, doesn't really exist anymore.

It does, Google just heavily penalizes non-top-website pages for some inexplicable reason, sometimes outright de-indexing them. I guess you could argue this is a consequence of stopping spam - better to just ignore all small sites rather than risk catching blogspam. But somehow there's still plenty of blogspam.

Why do you think ChatGPT will stay free of ads, SEO-spam, tracking, profiling, all the stuff that's wrong with traditional search?

I think SEO-spam would be much harder to implemented in an LLM vs. a traditional search engine. The harder part is figuring out an economic model where sources get any traffic in the first place.

In fact LLMs are precisely what is helping SEO spam destroy Google (and all other) search. That may be why MS loves ChatGPT so much.

I agree, google has been coasting way to long on past successes - they are ripe for smaller/nimbler/newer companies to start chipping away at their revenues.

Microsoft is financing OpenAI.

correct, now they are - but OpenAI got a pretty good head start and foothold before Microsoft made an investment, and inarguably, were smaller and nimbler than google at the time - but I am not talking just about openAI, google has many, many products and services - they need to defend them all from lots of different startups and smaller players simultaneously who only need to be good at that one thing to start making dents in googles armour.

coasting on their search+ads monopoly you mean.

Github Copilot was the real killer for me. I would say around 80% of the time I no longer have to leave my IDE for trivial problems (e.g. I no longer Google the regex) that I'd otherwise just rip from Stack Overflow.

Those searches aren't monetized anyway afaik, so I'm not sure it's really a bad thing for Google that you no longer make those queries.

Well, I would argue that if the company had the gumption to do a 180 (on short-term spam/enshit/ads) they are the best placed company to revitalize and still dominate the search market 5 years from now.

It's really hard to argue they don't have everything they would need to build the best product on a technical level - information, AI-talent, capital. But somehow we all know they are going to kill the golden goose for a quick feast.

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