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Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

I mean, it’s a legitimate concern. Google is bleeding so hard right now from Gen Z and especially Gen Alpha deciding to use ChatGPT first and foremost when asking questions that Google would’ve answered previously. Whether or not that means they should keep Chrome as a product is up for debate.

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Under good Monopoly law, you would remedy the situation that got them to this point, not worry about their future. Chrome + Deals got to them to this point so that's what you unwind. If it causes Google to get weakened and AI finishes them off, that's just creative destruction at work and oh well.

The ease with which a total newcomer was able to steal share from Google is real-world evidence that there wasn't really a monopoly and that Google competitors (Bing, etc.) just sucked and didn't want to spend the money to be better.

Well, courts disagree with your assessment and so do I. Yes, AI is a threat to Google. How much a threat remains to be seen. From normies I know, most of them are just using Gemini or whatever is on Google front page. They are not starting most of their searches on OpenAI or other ones.

ChatGPT feels like it's in a lot of day to day conversations these days, you even hear people mention it on the street in non tech cities

Another thing I've noticed is that many people refer to everything as 'ChatGPT', regardless of which 'AI' they're using.

ChatGPT has for sure the "first mover" strength for normies (you can hear it mentioned in TV, radio and in the street, but also lot of people just talk about "AI". So, IMO there is still space to be used as "the AI" rather then specifically ChatGPT. It might also just be always referred to "ChatGPT" when talking about another provider, just like people saying "Kleenex" when referring to tissues.

Courts also decided you couldn't bundle a web browser and then turned a blind eye when it's done on a different platform with draconian restrictions against even installing an alternate browser.

They didn't "turn[] a blind eye" as they weren't asked the question again. There was no legal precedent established by the Microsoft case that required all future operating systems to have a replaceable browser engine. Also, the factual situations were quite different: Microsoft had a de facto monopoly on PC OSes in the late 1990s, while Apple never had a monopoly on mobile devices.

You sound old. No one I know under the age of 30 uses Google. It’s all ChatGPT

You make it sound like some AI company snapped 5% of global search traffic from Google across all devices. What's the actual number ?

I'd hazard a guess much higher than 5%

I asked Grok and Gemini and they both said there have been reports that Google search has dropped below 90% for the first time, so it’s significant but it’s like a 1-2% drop.

isnt the monopoly on ads, not search?

They stole share from Google because search is becoming obsolete, not because a new search engine came to town. It's like saying 5G stole market share from AOL's dial-up business. Search still has a use, and Google still takes > 90% of all search, so it's still a monopoly, and I'll add that Google is trying to leverage that monopoly to expand Gemini.

> Under good Monopoly law, you would remedy the situation that got them to this point, not worry about their future.

I mean but it appears to be being remedy'd by itself why would the court proscribe something for a problem that no longer exists?

Because it happened. If I was stealing cable but then all shows I wanted to watch switched to streaming, should I be let off the hook because situation remedy'd itself? I'd imagine most people would say no, the fact you can no longer do the crime in the future does not change the fact you did the crime in the past.

This is a civil case. The point is to remedy the situation, not to punish a crime.

We don't know at all that AI will actually make Google search moot.

Chrome had nothing to do with the case, though; the prosecutors were grasping at straws. The obvious remedy is to ban Google from bidding for placement, which is what happened.

>Google is bleeding so hard right now from Gen Z and especially Gen Alpha deciding to use ChatGPT

Is this an evidence based claim? From the Q2 2025 numbers Google saw double digit revenue growth YoY for search.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/23/google-expec...

I wonder how much of that 12% is due to USD tanking 10%

Yeah and almost all of the gain is surely from ChatGPT using Google to search to enrich ChatGPT results.

I'm Gen X and recently been using ChatGPT a hell of a lot more than Google, especially for queries similar to sibling comment. Instead of trying to word my query optimally for search, I just write what I'm trying to achieve in natural language and I get an answer, instead of having to scan a few results to know if they're likely candidates. Even with the made up shit on occasion this is a win.

It's the only viable option for surfacing knowledge that is nearly gone from the dead internet.

Google intentionally crippling search by routinely ignoring search terms or unnecessarily generalizing them is coming to bite them in the ass.

Or by people like me with LM Studio, a lightweight GGUF from Hugging Face, and maybe some kind of vector database MCP tool.

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