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Comment by acoustics | Hacker News Reader

ChatGPT dominates the consumer market (though Nano Banana is singlehandedly breathing some life into consumer Gemini).

A small anecdote: when ChatGPT went down a few months ago, a lot of young people (especially students) just waited for it to come back up. They didn't even think about using an alternative.

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When ChatGPT starts injecting ads or forcing payment or doing anything else that annoys its userbase then the young people won't have a problem looking for alternatives

This "moat" that OpenAI has is really weak

They took early steps to do so (ads) just recently. User response was as you'd expect.

That's pretty nuts. With the models changing so much and so often, you have to switch it up sometimes just to see what the other company is offering.

How often do you or people you know use a search engine other than google?

That is different because all of the players I mentioned have credible, near-leading products in the AI model market, whereas nobody other than Google has search results worth a damn. I wouldn't recommend anyone squander their time by checking Kagi or DDG or Bing more than once.

I don't use google. Believe it or not, I get better results via Bing (usually via DDG, which is a frontend for Bing). But I asked the rhetorical question expecting the answer you gave. These people use ChatGPT only for the same reason you exclusively use Google.

Right, that's consistent with what I said if you re-read it. Search isn't changing. If you are happy with your search you would be wasting your time to shop around.

The consumer market is a loss leader.

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