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Comment by _air | Hacker News Reader

Is Google losing significant web traffic to ChatGPT and others? I don't understand why else they'd test a product like this so widely.

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I think they are terrified of GenAI eliminating people's desire to do traditional web searches. It's basically the quick answers Google has been offering for years, but much more in depth and complete (if correct).

My dad has been talking a lot about how he wants to start using ChatGPT more instead of Google, and he thinks is going to make his life much better.

I would assume to appease the markets, whose limited collective wisdom is currently zeroing in on AI. Google has been known to overreact before; remember Google+, at the height of the social media boom?

I don’t know, but I am curious as how they are going to monetize it.

I'm curious how websites will stay in business once it's kinda good or people just start thinking it's true

Seems like eventually, it would become the dominant predator, and deplete its food supply?

With these companies crawling the internet, it’ll be a race to create content. Then reuse the models to generate more, new content for your website

It’ll be diminishing returns for visitors

Worse than that is that it will diminish the desire to create.

You will pay Google to insert your ads into AI generated answers. No need for the hassle of creating a website anymore. What a relief for businesses!

That’s an interesting thought. Just order your fast food through Gemini, or schedule your car repair or book a hotel directly through gemini without going to a different website.

I haven’t even considered that.

I swear I saw a screenshot of Microsoft’s with ads inline. I couldn’t find it after.

Maybe the websites remaining will be genuinely interesting texts that you’d actually want to read instead of just query for an answer.

Sure, things like blogs.

But if you need info for a movie or something, where will the data come from? Back to newspapers?

I would imagine Google doing something like: “just use this service to keep your information up to date and you’ll get monetized automatically based on users querying your data”.

Right now they have us convinced to optimize how we give them data for them to be able to parse it (schema.org, etc). So we give them the data, optimize it for them ingesting it, then we loose traffic because people get the data on the search page.

We'll probably have to pay them to give them the data...

Yeah, but thinking about it now, this happens because Google has a monopoly on search and they can afford to dictate the rules. I think that with more companies competing with AI the field is a bit more even, and Google would be the one needing this kind of “advantage”.

I honestly wonder if there's eventually going to be "sponsored" answers. I shudder to even think of it, but it seems naive to think we are not going in that direction.

It also may not be as blatant or as obvious as sponsored results are now. It could be mixed in seamlessly.

https://www.adweek.com/media/openai-preferred-publisher-prog...

Ads

What are you going to do? Switch to Bing?

Good luck, Bing puts Chat GPT on top of their results!

Because what are you going to do? Switch to Brave Search? To Kagi?

Well, guess who else is trying to put AI into their search engines!

It's like a percent. For Google I guess that's significant.

If they had any sense at all (questionable) they would be absolutely pants-shittingly terrified that their prized product has been completely undercut by an upstart in a matter of months, and that Microsoft has a deep partnership with that competitor. I'd think even the leadership at Google can figure out that ChatGPT eats their lunch in terms of cutting through the SEO bullshit and giving actual information.

If they were even approaching baseline-clever, they'd realize that they've caused people to be so pissed at the declining quality of their search for years and that they'll happily jump ship.

Google was always better than Yahoo/Bing at dealing with webspam (whether Google can continue to beat current webspam is a different debate). Bing is happily traning on the things they don't know are bad results. Garbage in garbage out.

The only competition Google needs to worry about is Google's leadership. Once Cloud brought in TK and they started actively recruiting from Microsoft and Oracle it was like an infection of stupid they haven't been able to fight.

Not sure if it's strictly the recruiting pool that made things break down, but I see it more as a result of COVID/WFH + the recruiting pool. Google's strong in-office culture once helped new joiners learn the culture and challenge others in a respectful way - now it's a political minefield.

Remote work is great, but it probably accelerated Google's culture decline. If you've been there a while, you'll notice the wild difference in employee attitudes when comparing pre-2019 employees to post 2020 employees.

> Remote work is great, but it probably accelerated Google's culture decline.

Absolutely agree. A lot of the top talent bailed when they started demanding return to office. Google played the "if you don't X we will fire you" with a bunch of L7+ that ... surprise, could easily get jobs elsewhere or had enough GSUs to flat out retire.

Yeah, I left to start my own company (which I was already contemplating) but some of the changes in early 2023 were the catalyst that I needed to make the jump. I made sure to give the best feedback that I could in my exit interview, but I doubt it has much of an impact at a company that large.

Depending on who you ask, Google's search issues started as early as 2010 (Instant) or 2016 ("brands"). Many of the things people complain about regarding Google's culture - shuttering projects arbitrarily, hiring issues (the interview gauntlet, anti-competitive practices, etc.), the slow erosion of Don't Be Evil - are 2010s products, also. I don't think this is WFH, at its root.

Personally, every time I see chat GPT's output I just skip it. I look at it and I'm not sure it's quoting things literally or changing them, so I can't trust anything the summary says, and if I'm going to click the links anyway, I don't need the summary.

Completely is a wild overstatement of what OpenAI has done to Google. There was an article on hackernews a few weeks ago about the actual trends that showed GPT had barely scratched Google's share of traffic and that OpenAI was hemorrhaging users after the initial sign up.

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