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Comment by dools | Hacker News Reader

The funny thing is that as much as everyone complains about AI overviews and Google losing the plot and so on, about a year and a half ago the “where did you hear about us” field on my website stopped being dominated by “Google” and started being dominated by “ChatGPT”.

Normal people are using AI for search more already, Google is just trying to stop their primary business from completely disappearing.

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I'm using chatbots for search, but that's only because Google became so horrible at it.

I'd rather just have results without chatbot fluff.

But then what's the point of using google if I can use any chatbot directly.

They are transforming google search into chatbot but they already have a chatbot and by dping that they are losing google search product completely.

I miss times when search used to be fulltext search (also in youtube, ebay, etc). Now it is some kind of embedding vector search skewed by marketing and my previous visit history. It often shows completely irelevant and useless results and it is much harder (even impossible sometimes) to find something even though I am sure it exists (and I am able to find it eventually but it takes much more effort).

I do mostly use AI instead of Google these days. When I do use Google, it's because I want to use Google and not an AI. But Google increasingly shoves AI in my face.

My dad exclusively uses perplexity and I think completely stopped using google. It's definitely more common than we realize.

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