Everyone says “advertise!” Like it’s a magic bullet. The tech industry is littered with companies that have high traffic and couldn’t figure out how to monetize via advertising. Yahoo being the canonical example.

Besides the cost of serving an LLM request - using someone else’s infrastructure and someone else’s search engine is magnitudes higher than a Google search.

Besides defaults matter. Google is the default search engine for every mobile phone outside of China and the three browsers with the most market share

Little off topic but I just got done cleaning up my friend's dad's estate. He had dementia the last ~5 years of his life.

The amount of random fucking subscriptions this senile old dude was paying is mind boggling. We're talking nearly $10k/month in random shit. Monthly lingerie subscription? Yup, 62 year old dude. Dick pill subscription? Yup. Subscription to pay his subscriptions? Yup.

It makes me really wonder how much of the US economy is just old senile people paying for shit they don't realize.

We also found millions in random accounts all over the place. It's just mind boggling.