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Comment by woopwoop | Hacker News Reader

Maybe? But you could have written this same thing in 1999 with OpenAI and Google replaced by Google and Yahoo, respectively.

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And Google had profits - not just revenue - early on and wasn’t setting $10 on fire to have a $1 in revenue.

Well maybe not in 1999. Adwords didn't launch until 2000? Google's 1999 revenue was...... I forget, but it was incredibly small. Costs were also incredibly small too though, so this isn't a good analogy given the stated year of 1999.

Google in 1999 was already far superior to Yahoo and other competitors. I don't think OpenAI is in a similar position there. It seems debatable as to whether they're even the best, let alone a massive leap ahead of everyone else the way Google was.

Agree.

And GOOG is not a one trick poney any more, by far, especially when it comes to revenue.

Can't say the same of OpenAI

Google was better but it wasn't far superior to AltaVista is what I remember.

Yahoo was always more a directory of websites.

AltaVista was better than Lycos or Yahoo but then Google was faster, gave better results than AltaVista and the very minimal UI was something interesting. I quite liked AltaVista but I never went back to it after using Google either.

I might even say Gemini 3 is better than GPT5 than what Google was to AltaVista. GPT5 feels rather useless to me after my time now with Gemini.

> Google was better but it wasn't far superior to AltaVista is what I remember.

Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but I remember it being significantly better. Alta Vista, you'd have to dig into page 8 before getting to the good stuff. History is written by the victors, as they say, but I remember Google search results being significantly better than Altavista. It wouldn't be until two decades later that I got to work there though.

As I remember it (I was just starting college at the time), Google search was an absolute revelation. You could type in a search term and the first hit would usually be what you wanted. AltaVista required a lot of looking through results to find the right thing and messing around with boolean operators. People switched over and never looked back. Google went from zero to a substantial majority market share in only about one year.

Google was immediately better than Yahoo, that's why people switched en masse.

Same thing happen with Internet Explorer and Chrome, or going from Yahoo mail/Hotmail to Gmail.

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