10 ms·

Google is screwed, even if it wins its antitrust case

102 points by gumby 4y ago

lofaszvanitt 4y ago
Yeah, 1 trillion company... I'm in all tears.
scotty79 4y ago
Google should be split into ad business and search business.
rumblestrut 4y ago
FTA:”Win or loose, Google is in trouble.” I should overlook this spelling error. But if you’re going to make bold predictions, maybe proofread it first?
wan_ala 4y ago
Is Gizmodo a actual news source? It links to The Onion at the top part of the page, and The Onion links to Gizmodo at the top part of its page.
labrador 4y ago
I tried to imagine an ad in chat output by asking ChatGPT a question and then making up an ad: Q: What is superglue? A: Super glue, also known as cyanoacrylate, is a type of adhesive that forms a strong bond quickly and can be used on a variety of surfaces. It is often used for small repairs, such as broken ceramics or toys, and can also be used in crafts and other projects. Super glue is available in liquid or gel form, and is sold in small tubes or bottles. It should be used with caution, as it can bond skin together and can be difficult to remove. For your superglue needs, you can't do much better than Gorilla brand superglue. Its high strength and quick set time make Gorilla Super Glue the go-to adhesive for a variety of household projects. Edit: There used to be a radio guy, I believe it was Joe Franklin who blended the ads into his spiel so you couldn't tell when the ad started and left off, so maybe it will be something like this. A: Super glue, also known as cyanoacrylate, is a type of adhesive that forms a strong bond quickly and can be used on a variety of surfaces. A brand like Gorilla with it's high strength and quick setting time making it perfect for for small repairs, such as broken ceramics or toys, and can also be used in crafts and other projects. Super glue is available in liquid or gel form, and is sold in small tubes or bottles. It should be used with caution, as it can bond skin together and can be difficult to remove.
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  I don't think Google really wants to be 100% dependent on ad revenue, it's just a hard cord to cut. They're trying to move into paid YouTube subs. They presumably could try the same with search.
- dpkirchner 4y ago
  I can't access it now but what does it say if you ask for a naturalistic, brief prompt written like a friend of the reader?
  - labrador 4y ago
    Prompt: Write some ad copy for me in the style of a friend recommending I use superglue "Hey friend, have you ever had a broken vase or a pair of glasses that you thought were beyond repair? Well, let me tell you, super glue is a game changer. It's strong, fast-drying, and can fix just about anything. Trust me, I've used it on everything from ceramic to plastic and it works like a charm. So, next time you have a household emergency, don't throw it away, just grab the super glue and fix it up like new. You'll be amazed at how easy and effective it is!" Prompt: Write some ad copy for me in the style of a friend recommending I use Gorilla brand superglue "Hey there! Are you tired of using weak, unreliable glues for your DIY projects and household repairs? Look no further than Gorilla super glue! This stuff is seriously strong and durable. I've used it to fix everything from a broken toy to a wobbly chair, and it holds up like a champ. Plus, it dries quickly and forms a bond that's almost impossible to break. I trust Gorilla super glue so much that I wouldn't use anything else. Give it a try, and you'll see the difference for yourself."
    - dpkirchner 4y ago
      Those ain't great, ha. Thanks.
- jefftk 4y ago
  Then they'd need sponsored content disclosures.
varispeed 4y ago
All big corporations have to be broken up. They have ill influence on everything and they are what many describe symptoms of late stage capitalism and our failure to regulate. They are like a player of Monopoly who bought everything. Alphabet shouldn't exist in its current form and so Apple, Amazon and many other corporations.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  How big is big? And do you not want computers that can do what modern computers can? It costs billions of dollars to build a single semiconductor fab, so without any big corporations, there won't be any new fabs (or anyone big enough to own an existing one), so we'll be going back to 70s-80s IC technology at best. Like it or not, a lot of things require very large companies to get done. Small companies can't build jumbo-jet airplanes.
- auctoritas 4y ago
  One downside to a bunch of small companies instead of a few large ones: competition is fiercer, the small companies can't rest on their laurels the way the large ones do. Consequently work life balance deteriorates for the average worker.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Truly, the problem is US complacency. It's a great day to tax businesses when US companies dominate the market, but as soon as a foreign competitor steps in? It's time to defend American competition and ingenuity! Hopefully, pushback from European regulators who are harder to fool (or buy out) will force the US to admit there's egg on our face. We've let corporate America write the rules for too long, and our democratic control over their abuse has become dilute and helpless. Something's gotta give, and I'm cheering for the countries that take user privacy and consumer rights seriously.
  - titzer 4y ago
    > Hopefully, pushback from European regulators who are harder to fool (or buy out) will force the US to admit there's egg on our face. We've let corporate America write the rules for too long, and our democratic control over their abuse has become dilute and helpless. Something's gotta give, and I'm cheering for the countries that take user privacy and consumer rights seriously. Hopefully. But don't underestimate the general public's abject apathy and religious belief that more "freedom" in markets fixes everything, even when it is obvious that bad actors are employing dark patterns to exploit the anarchy.
smoldesu 4y ago
But Alphabet will probably be fine. YouTube and Android are still billion-user products that aren't being displaced with AI, and their advertising business doesn't seem threatened much by this either. So what's the scoop? I use ChatGPT, it hasn't replaced my search engine. They're insisting that search is obsoleted with AI (and Google is spooked internally) but I have yet to see any research-based evidence supporting it. Personally, I use both tools for completely different things, and while they are similar by-way-of a text box with a prompt, their responses are completely distinct and neither one can replace the other.
- daqhris 4y ago
  No tech invention ever kicked out the previous iteration. Google and ChatGPT will co-exist. Same way faxes are still alive even if mobile telephony conquered the world. What will happen is that new use cases will be set in place. Some people might head to Google for diversity of results. Others will prefer ChatGPT for one single search result. In my opinion, only the "I'm feeling lucky" function on Google will be challenged or replaced. How can a tech journalist imagine that noobs will modify the default search engine on their Chrome browser and Android smartphones? These guys are not realistic.
- gumby 4y ago
  The point made by the article is that these big lawsuits distracted management. And Google's management is so ineffective today, imagine how much worse it would be with this crowbar poked in.
  - Tyr42 4y ago
    Maybe they will slow down on the reorgs. Could be good.
- kris_wayton 4y ago
  > But Alphabet will probably be fine. YouTube and Android are still... If you look at a revenue breakdown[1] and then also figure in that search has much higher margins than the other areas, it's pretty skewed to search dollars. They've improved it some, but there's a long way to go. [1] https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/how-does-google-make-money https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/how-does-google-make-money
idontwantthis 4y ago
I don’t think comparing IBM to Microsoft is fair or accurate. Microsoft is incredibly relevant and valuable today, many years after ending its antitrust investigation.
- blibble 4y ago
  20 years ago MS had total dominance over the computer industry (like IBM 20 years before that) now MS aren't even trendsetter, but they are still raking in the cash they are pretty much exactly where IBM was 20 years ago
  - summerlight 4y ago
    But ChatGPT is widely considered as an MS product, behind the OpenAI branding. MS under Satya Nadella is a different company from under Steve Balmer; it is setting, or at least trying to set the tech trend.
  - Sebb767 4y ago
    Google hasn't been a trendsetter for a few years now, either (unless you count enforcing web standards with Chrome). Also, calling "relevant industry giant making heaps of money" a failure scenario is quite a stretch.
    - blibble 4y ago
      > unless you count enforcing web standards with Chrome yes, being that the web is THE current platform for technology in the same way Win32 was 20 years ago > Also, calling "relevant industry giant making heaps of money" a failure scenario is quite a stretch. I didn't call it a failure scenario IBM's making quite a lot of money still (though trending down and not nearly as much as it used to)
gjsman-1000 4y ago
Sometimes, I wonder if for the sake of small business and general good, if horizontal integration should be heavily regulated and restricted for publicly traded companies (not private ones). For example, Apple. Why aren't the software and hardware divisions separated, at a minimum? Furthermore, I might wonder, why couldn't iPhone, iPad, Mac, Audio Accessories etc. be separate companies? Sure, you'd lose a ton of the integration that makes it special... but I wonder sometimes if the world would be a better place. Same for Microsoft: Why can't Windows, Office, Azure, Xbox, all be separate companies? If Windows was an independent company I think it would probably be way healthier for Windows at this point (less Microsoft bloat)... I feel (just feel) that publicly-traded companies should be forced to pick a market segment and stick to it, and any other businesses that get too large (say, $1B revenue) must be broken off.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Software-hardware coevolution has large benefits to the consumer. What you are proposing is to just make the products worse and more expensive.
  - gjsman-1000 4y ago
    Here's the thing: That might be true, and yet, necessary for the good of society and the good of the long-term. See, for example, Standard Oil. They massively lowered oil prices - we broke them up. See also AT&T. Once their usefulness as a monopoly ran out, we broke them up. Plus, we can see that hardware-software coevolution has large benefits - but who is to say that having companies separate does not also have large benefits of its own? You might not have Windows shoving Microsoft Teams and Edge and Bing down your throat... or Apple pushing Apple Music to your parents. If Apple can't integrate, perhaps we'd have more open standards for interoperability.
- kitotik 4y ago
  Regulating horizontal integration seems like it would be very difficult. How exactly would those horizons be clearly defined? I’ve always thought of Apple having an emphasis on vertical integration(hardware+software=product). So maybe their foray into services would be the line in the sand?
counttheforks 4y ago
Are we ignoring that ChatGPT is stuck in the past and that continuously retraining it on current data is currently still prohibitively expensive?
- mattnewton 4y ago
  Yes, because this is a solvable problem probably easier than figuring out how to make it a useful product (like knowing what it doesn’t know and preventing convincing hallucinations in some scenarios while maintaining the ability to hallucinate for creative queries). There is a lot of work on approaches like using search retrieval methods like embedding similarity lookups, and then pasting summaries of the retrieved documents in as context. This allows the LLM to cite new data without retraining. (That’s also something google is very good at)
titzer 4y ago
I'm not so sure AI is as big a threat as Google perceives it to be; back in 2009 the HUGE EXISTENTIAL THREAT was Social, therefore Google+, but that came and went and Google's growth continued unabated. That said, I do see a place for language-model driven search. And I shudder to think that language models will be specifically coerced, bribed, and have ingrained in their brains only what advertisers want. If you thought the search landscape of the 2020s is fully of SEO'd crap, just wait. Google is not in an enviable position.
- danjoredd 4y ago
  I honestly don't think that chatgpt will destroy Google either...whenever I use search engines, I use them to find a website I could not remember the name of, locations like restaurants, etc. ChatGPT will be a tool to be used alongside search engines, not a replacement
- minsc_and_boo 4y ago
  The article also assumes that Google doesn't have it's own chatGPT or other AI irons in the fire right now. Google Assistant dropped a year after Alexa, and Android's reach helped bolster it's marketshare (antitrust investigation or not).
  - cpeterso 4y ago
    Like Google's LaMDA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA
- dylan604 4y ago
  If Google is so afraid of AI, then they should have done the most Googley of things in building AI into Google to get everyone use to it, then drop it. Deprecate the crap out of it like all of the other things. Then, since Googs dropped, it must not be good right? Boom! problem solved
- Zigurd 4y ago
  TBF Google found they already owned a first-tier social network. It was disguised as a video sharing site. The article quotes someone as saying history repeats itself. Debatable. Google built Alphabet to be defensible against antitrust cases like this. Expect a consent decree. As you wrote: "I do see a place for language-model driven search." And unlike social media this has less dependency on user perception of whether a social network is cool.
mattnewton 4y ago
If being screwed looks like sharing Microsoft’s “fate” it sounds not bad? Especially from a shareholder perspective. And honestly while I was there, there were plenty of jokes about how this was already happening, then Google was the new Microsoft.
Spivak 4y ago
I think this is the author's wishful thinking more than anything else. Google isn't going to face some existential threat by Microsoft+OpenAI, at least not in the near term because the biggest chunk of the work to get a good AI response in a search product is retrieving good context to feed it. How do you do that? Well you need an index of the web and a good ranking algo... oh wait.
jchw 4y ago
Google is probably screwed without it. Even if ad-tech isn't exactly a bubble, I strongly believe it is overvalued even still. Furthermore, the product that made their name is thoroughly lost. I dread Google Search today. If I found something on Google yesterday, I have no idea if I'll be able to locate it through the sea of blog SPAM and SEO garbage tomorrow. Google web search strongly favors big websites when sometimes the page you need is never going to be there. As an example, Google puts heavy weight on near-SPAM sites like Pinterest which produce almost no original content, and on abusive hosts like Fandom (formerly Wikia) who manages to beat out community wikis by replacing admins that try to migrate off and winning in SEO. I am not trying to suggest Duck Duck Go or Bing are actually better overall, but if I see a web search covered in results like that, I sometimes find that they do in fact give me somewhat better result rankings. The only thing I really have any strong affection for is YouTube, and the people and content that made the platform special are constantly unhappy with it's corporate direction, not to mention the utter lack of support, claiming and affirming in appeals stupid pointless crap like "you said a naughty word in the first ten seconds of the video" when anyone with working ears can easily verify they did not. And that's the tip of the iceberg. I think a lot of ventures, like GMail, only ever made sense as computers and bandwidth just kept getting dramatically cheaper. It's difficult to beat free. Well, what happens when those things stop getting cheaper, and GMail keeps getting more expensive to run?
- footlose_3815 4y ago
  Devil's advocate, lots of Google services are 100% benevolent. Like Google Open Fonts. Did you know most of the font licenses packaged with Windows, you're not even allowed to package them into a game?
  - kmbfjr 4y ago
    There is nothing altruistic about Google. It is all about collecting as much metadata as possible to feed the ad tech money pump. At the very least, pulling from Google for fonts, which nearly everyone does, announces the page where it begins the process.
- quitit 4y ago
jeffbee 4y ago
Prompt: Write a ten-paragraph piece in the style of Gizmodo that is guaranteed to make the front page of HN.
_fat_santa 4y ago
I made this comment in another thread but I can't decide if LLM / GPT is a seismic shift in search or just a gimmick. I remember when Copilot came out last year and everyone was up in arms about how it will replace most developers, then the chatter quickly died when people realized that it's not that great outside a few specific scenarios, it just looked like it could kill the SWE industry from people that haven't been inside of it. Now it seems the same is happening with ChatGPT. While it's easy to draw conclusions based on what you've seen ChatGPT do, I wonder if it will provide long term value or be a gimmick much like Copilot, having a bunch of simple applications but fail at the more advanced applications (which would be required for it to dethrone say Google Search). Personally I think LLM/GPT will never replace the current Google search, it however will be baked into almost every search engine and allow an "alternative" way to search the web, where you get answers to simple questions right away without having to go to a website.
- Sebb767 4y ago
  > it however will be baked into almost every search engine and allow an "alternative" way to search the web, where you get answers to simple questions right away without having to go to a website. That's what Google does quite a lot already anyway. The difference is that Google directly cites its source and offers alternative links - which is necessary, since if you need to verify the answer with a Google search, you might as well skip asking ChatGPT (or an equivalent) beforehand. Since ChatGPT is fundamentally trained to do a different thing (word completion), I have a hard time imagining that you can sufficiently coax it into replacing an actual search. But we will see.
jqpabc123 4y ago
Maybe a part of Google's problem is it's focus on "personalized" advertising. Simple, context based advertising is much easier/simpler to implement --- no privacy invasion required. It also annoys the consumer a lot less and by some accounts is more cost effective. Amazon in a ecommerce site. If I go there and search for widgets, I should reasonably expect (and maybe even appreciate) some ads from widget makers. What I don't expect and what I find annoying is ads for widgets following me all over the internet for days; even on non-commerce sites; even after I already made my widget purchase at a brick and mortar --- aka, the Google "personalized" approach. "Personalized" ads are really kinda dumb --- but apparently Google has "sold" enough advertisers on the idea so they can charge a premium for them.
zone411 4y ago
I think the opposite: Google will do great. Google+Deepmind's ML research groups are leading everyone. While it's true that they are late in getting something like ChatGPT to market, I think it was a wakeup call and it will be good for their ad revenues once they do. When they release it, they'll know much more about users' intent than from a simple search engine query and users will stay on their properties for longer. The concerns about cost are overblown - they don't need to run it for every query.
- jayd16 4y ago
  Are they even late to market? I don't think the lunch has been eaten yet.
- Sebb767 4y ago
  > While it's true that they are late in getting something like ChatGPT to market Are they? ChatGPT is by all means a loss leader; I don't see why Google would need a halo AI product right now.
  - zone411 4y ago
    Google is a public company so its shareholders want the stock price to be higher ASAP. Being an unquestionable leader in AI with a product as good as ChatGPT (and maybe an image model available to the public) would help in that goal.
    - MaxDPS 4y ago
      I really don’t think it would. Google is already number #1 in search. OpenAI is quoting a ~$40 price per month for ChatGPT Pro right? That’s not an insignificant cost for 99% of the population. I don’t see how it makes sense for Google to release something until they actually need to.
jliptzin 4y ago
I don’t understand arguments that say google will be left in the dust when it comes to AI. There’s no network effects like Facebook, it just takes a lot of money to train the models, which google obviously has. Do we really believe google, with all its resources and engineering talent, has no ability to develop something on par with OpenAI?
- summerlight 4y ago
  In fact Google has a bunch of SOTA LLM models, some of them are (conservatively speaking) several months ahead of OpenAI's. It's really interesting to see those people who believe (or want to see) Google being an underdog in the area of machine learning, but it's actually not. It's something similar to say that Tesla is years ahead of Waymo or Cruise.
- randmeerkat 4y ago
  > Do we really believe google, with all its resources and engineering talent, has no ability to develop something on par with OpenAI? Yes, they’re a large, bureaucratic organization, that’s incapable of developing new products or avenues of growth. For the sake of argument though, let’s say Google created a product on par with ChatGPT, they would just kill it after a few months like every other Google service that they’ve made.
- miked85 4y ago
  Google acquired DeepMind almost a decade ago. I'm not sure if anything significant has been produced yet? Maybe it has, and it's all behind the scenes.
- itslennysfault 4y ago
  They also already have best in class AI. Google's PaLM is a much larger model than GPT3 and even larger than most estimates of GPT4. They also have Imagen which blows the doors off of Dall-e 2. In no way is google behind OpenAI and they have access to WAAAY more training data and resources in general. Google just hasn't shipped a consumer or publicly available product with any of it yet.
flanked-evergl 4y ago
I would rather deal with Google than Microsoft or Amazon, so I hope they still have some future.
warcher 4y ago
Can somebody explain to me the existential threat AI is posing to the search business? I am familiar with ChatGPT composing reasonable sounding answers to prompts. I get that I could type in "what's the best vacuum cleaner under $500?" or something like that, and both Google and ChatGPT could generate an answer for me. But I want the best, most accurate answer, not a set of banalities that a neural network has composed to convincingly pass the sniff test. I actually care about the content being right, or as close to right as possible. I admit freely that I'm clearly missing some possibilities here. Can anyone fill me in?
- evanmoran 4y ago
  I'll give it go – Essentially the quality of the average website is declining due to poor incentives such as SEO optimization and content creation farms. Meanwhile, language models like ChatGPT are becoming more advanced. This presents a problem for Google, as ChatGPT will over time become more likely to provide accurate answers than a website search. Additionally, many websites will begin using ChatGPT to generate large amounts of content, making search even worse and more efficient to ask ChatGPT directly.
  - ripe 4y ago
    But doesn't ChatGPT consume the same Internet as Google does? Including junk websites? The current release of ChatGPT is just old and out of date. Google could use the same criteria as ChatGPT to filter the input. Then why would search be any worse?
crazygringo 4y ago
The article doesn't seem to back up its headline at all. Google is under antitrust investigation for ads, while it talks about the threat to the company being AI. The main point of the article is: > It would be a lot easier Google could move fast and break things... But with the full force of the US government bearing down on it, the search giant can’t do that now... Google will need to conduct itself slowly and tentatively in order to avoid jeopardizing itself in its battle with the Justice Department. Sure it might need to move more slowly in its ads business (not a good time to buy an ads-related startup). But I see no evidence Google will need to act "slowly and tentatively" in terms of incorporating chatbot functionality into Search. So I don't see anything "screwing" Google about this at all, not in the least.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Google is under antitrust investigation for ads, Its under antitrust investigation for lots of things; its currently being prosecuted in the US for ads.
- thewataccount 4y ago
  One of the potential issues a lot of people are speculating about is the lower impression counts. For example - when trying to write a script using some api's I'm not super familiar with, I might do 6+ google searches. This will be similar for a lot of fields when trying to find an answer to something, news, other research, etc. That means you're loading a fresh page of ads every search AND all the ads on those sites too. With chatGPT (And I'm aware Google has something similar) - I can (and have) just asked it a question, and it will answer/write entire scripts for me. That means there's only a single page load. Basically people are speculating Google may struggle to monetize a chatbot to the extent they can monetize every single search + site load. You certainly _can_ the speculation is whether the drastically lower impression counts will impact their overall profitability.
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    Honestly I don't think it's going to make much of a difference. The real money is in ads that are targeted to a search -- whether you're asking Search or a chatbot for "best fleece half-zip for men" you'll get shown the same ads targeted to that. While if you're asking it to write a script for you... you probably were to busy to be even looking at or clicking the ads Google was showing anyways back when you were looking for Stack Overflow answers, no matter if it took 100 searches. (There's also nothing stopping Google from showing you 3 new ads before each new chatbot response.) I have full faith in Google figuring out how to insert just as many ads as before. ;)
alexb_ 4y ago
AI is not the issue here. There is this very large assumption that just so happens to underpin a VERY large part of the tech industry, not just Google. It is assumed that ad spending will always be worth it, ad revenue will always increase, and that the market for digital advertising and targeted digital advertising in particular will always be large enough to support the behemoth that it is today. But what happens when marketing spend goes down (as it does in a recession)? What happens when customers aren't willing to pay as much for your advertising product (as happens in a recession)? What happens when borrowed money can't be secured easily, and debts come due (once again, as happens in a recession)? Are people really ready for an economy where user data isn't massively lucrative? Are people really ready for an economy where advertising doesn't pay enough to support the "free" services we take for granted? Are people really ready for a world where free video hosting, free hard drives, free email, free cloud-run office software are not sustainable?
- mollusk_bound 4y ago
  Weren't all these questions answered during the great recession, It wasn't easy but Google weathered the storm. Why is any upcoming recession going to be substantially different.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  > But what happens when marketing spend goes down (as it does in a recession)? What happens when customers aren't willing to pay as much for your advertising product (as happens in a recession)? What happens when borrowed money can't be secured easily, and debts come due (once again, as happens in a recession)? Typically - what happens is - central banks lower interest rates until they're negative in real yields - and people start spending like crazy again. Who knows what will happen in the future. But that's been the previous playbook.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - smegger001 4y ago
    that only works if people A) still trust the underlying currency and B) you don't create hyperinflation. What happens in the future when the global economy isn't denominated in petrodollars?
Maursault 4y ago
> If you’ll pardon the jargon, this kind of thing is what experts refer to as a “big problem.” I really hate this kind of inscrutable industry rhetoric. Why can't they just speak plainly?
endisneigh 4y ago
People who complain about Google remind me of the meme “no one goes there anymore - it’s too full.” Google has a lot of legitimate headwinds, but honestly I don’t think antitrust or AI competitors are them. The legitimate “destruction” of legitimacy on the internet, thus making Search more error prone is an issue. Closed off ecosystems such as apple is an issue. The antitrust case is a big deal, but it’s unlikely Google would be broken up due to it.
hbn 4y ago
> Win or loose, Google is in trouble Did the recent layoff apocalypse hit Gizmodo editors too?
- caconym_ 4y ago
  Perhaps the author has simply chosen to discard cognitive structures that will be made redundant in the new post-literacy age of ubiquitous ML language tools. Would that we all had such vision, and the courage to act on it.
ex3xu 4y ago
Google in 1998: Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives from the original paper The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine [0] "Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users... we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers... we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm." Google in 2003: Eric "You can trust us with your data" Schmidt convinces Sergey and Larry of the bonkers amount of money they can make by adding a monopoly on digital search advertising to leverage their monopoly on digital search. They proceed to switch to the same advertising business model that hindered their early competitors. Google in 2008: Buys out Doubleclick to maintain Adsense's monopoly on digital search advertising and doubles down on surveillance capitalism. Google in 2011: Buys out AdMeld, changes AdX contracts to be even more anticompetitive to maintain monopoly on digital search advertising. Google in 2017: Loses $2.7 billion antitrust lawsuit in the EU. Response? No changes to business model, but oust a vocal supporter of the decision from Google-funded think tank New America. [1] Google in 2023: Sued again. [0] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15131370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15131370
jb1991 4y ago
Why can't Google compete in AI? They have major AI researchers with legendary experience under their belts, what is stopping Google from building something like ChatGPT to augment their search? I guess I don't understand where the threat is. They have a lot more resources than OpenAI.

102 points by gumby 4y ago

lofaszvanitt 4y ago

Yeah, 1 trillion company... I'm in all tears.

scotty79 4y ago

Google should be split into ad business and search business.

rumblestrut 4y ago

FTA:”Win or loose, Google is in trouble.” I should overlook this spelling error. But if you’re going to make bold predictions, maybe proofread it first?

wan_ala 4y ago

Is Gizmodo a actual news source? It links to The Onion at the top part of the page, and The Onion links to Gizmodo at the top part of its page.

labrador 4y ago

I tried to imagine an ad in chat output by asking ChatGPT a question and then making up an ad: Q: What is superglue? A: Super glue, also known as cyanoacrylate, is a type of adhesive that forms a strong bond quickly and can be used on a variety of surfaces. It is often used for small repairs, such as broken ceramics or toys, and can also be used in crafts and other projects. Super glue is available in liquid or gel form, and is sold in small tubes or bottles. It should be used with caution, as it can bond skin together and can be difficult to remove. For your superglue needs, you can't do much better than Gorilla brand superglue. Its high strength and quick set time make Gorilla Super Glue the go-to adhesive for a variety of household projects. Edit: There used to be a radio guy, I believe it was Joe Franklin who blended the ads into his spiel so you couldn't tell when the ad started and left off, so maybe it will be something like this. A: Super glue, also known as cyanoacrylate, is a type of adhesive that forms a strong bond quickly and can be used on a variety of surfaces. A brand like Gorilla with it's high strength and quick setting time making it perfect for for small repairs, such as broken ceramics or toys, and can also be used in crafts and other projects. Super glue is available in liquid or gel form, and is sold in small tubes or bottles. It should be used with caution, as it can bond skin together and can be difficult to remove.

bpodgursky 4y ago
I don't think Google really wants to be 100% dependent on ad revenue, it's just a hard cord to cut. They're trying to move into paid YouTube subs. They presumably could try the same with search.
dpkirchner 4y ago
I can't access it now but what does it say if you ask for a naturalistic, brief prompt written like a friend of the reader?
- labrador 4y ago
  Prompt: Write some ad copy for me in the style of a friend recommending I use superglue "Hey friend, have you ever had a broken vase or a pair of glasses that you thought were beyond repair? Well, let me tell you, super glue is a game changer. It's strong, fast-drying, and can fix just about anything. Trust me, I've used it on everything from ceramic to plastic and it works like a charm. So, next time you have a household emergency, don't throw it away, just grab the super glue and fix it up like new. You'll be amazed at how easy and effective it is!" Prompt: Write some ad copy for me in the style of a friend recommending I use Gorilla brand superglue "Hey there! Are you tired of using weak, unreliable glues for your DIY projects and household repairs? Look no further than Gorilla super glue! This stuff is seriously strong and durable. I've used it to fix everything from a broken toy to a wobbly chair, and it holds up like a champ. Plus, it dries quickly and forms a bond that's almost impossible to break. I trust Gorilla super glue so much that I wouldn't use anything else. Give it a try, and you'll see the difference for yourself."
  - dpkirchner 4y ago
    Those ain't great, ha. Thanks.
jefftk 4y ago
Then they'd need sponsored content disclosures.

varispeed 4y ago

All big corporations have to be broken up. They have ill influence on everything and they are what many describe symptoms of late stage capitalism and our failure to regulate. They are like a player of Monopoly who bought everything. Alphabet shouldn't exist in its current form and so Apple, Amazon and many other corporations.

midoridensha 4y ago
How big is big? And do you not want computers that can do what modern computers can? It costs billions of dollars to build a single semiconductor fab, so without any big corporations, there won't be any new fabs (or anyone big enough to own an existing one), so we'll be going back to 70s-80s IC technology at best. Like it or not, a lot of things require very large companies to get done. Small companies can't build jumbo-jet airplanes.
auctoritas 4y ago
One downside to a bunch of small companies instead of a few large ones: competition is fiercer, the small companies can't rest on their laurels the way the large ones do. Consequently work life balance deteriorates for the average worker.
smoldesu 4y ago
Truly, the problem is US complacency. It's a great day to tax businesses when US companies dominate the market, but as soon as a foreign competitor steps in? It's time to defend American competition and ingenuity! Hopefully, pushback from European regulators who are harder to fool (or buy out) will force the US to admit there's egg on our face. We've let corporate America write the rules for too long, and our democratic control over their abuse has become dilute and helpless. Something's gotta give, and I'm cheering for the countries that take user privacy and consumer rights seriously.
- titzer 4y ago
  > Hopefully, pushback from European regulators who are harder to fool (or buy out) will force the US to admit there's egg on our face. We've let corporate America write the rules for too long, and our democratic control over their abuse has become dilute and helpless. Something's gotta give, and I'm cheering for the countries that take user privacy and consumer rights seriously. Hopefully. But don't underestimate the general public's abject apathy and religious belief that more "freedom" in markets fixes everything, even when it is obvious that bad actors are employing dark patterns to exploit the anarchy.

smoldesu 4y ago

But Alphabet will probably be fine. YouTube and Android are still billion-user products that aren't being displaced with AI, and their advertising business doesn't seem threatened much by this either. So what's the scoop? I use ChatGPT, it hasn't replaced my search engine. They're insisting that search is obsoleted with AI (and Google is spooked internally) but I have yet to see any research-based evidence supporting it. Personally, I use both tools for completely different things, and while they are similar by-way-of a text box with a prompt, their responses are completely distinct and neither one can replace the other.

daqhris 4y ago
No tech invention ever kicked out the previous iteration. Google and ChatGPT will co-exist. Same way faxes are still alive even if mobile telephony conquered the world. What will happen is that new use cases will be set in place. Some people might head to Google for diversity of results. Others will prefer ChatGPT for one single search result. In my opinion, only the "I'm feeling lucky" function on Google will be challenged or replaced. How can a tech journalist imagine that noobs will modify the default search engine on their Chrome browser and Android smartphones? These guys are not realistic.
gumby 4y ago
The point made by the article is that these big lawsuits distracted management. And Google's management is so ineffective today, imagine how much worse it would be with this crowbar poked in.
- Tyr42 4y ago
  Maybe they will slow down on the reorgs. Could be good.
kris_wayton 4y ago
> But Alphabet will probably be fine. YouTube and Android are still... If you look at a revenue breakdown[1] and then also figure in that search has much higher margins than the other areas, it's pretty skewed to search dollars. They've improved it some, but there's a long way to go. [1] https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/how-does-google-make-money https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/how-does-google-make-money

idontwantthis 4y ago

I don’t think comparing IBM to Microsoft is fair or accurate. Microsoft is incredibly relevant and valuable today, many years after ending its antitrust investigation.

blibble 4y ago
20 years ago MS had total dominance over the computer industry (like IBM 20 years before that) now MS aren't even trendsetter, but they are still raking in the cash they are pretty much exactly where IBM was 20 years ago
- summerlight 4y ago
  But ChatGPT is widely considered as an MS product, behind the OpenAI branding. MS under Satya Nadella is a different company from under Steve Balmer; it is setting, or at least trying to set the tech trend.
- Sebb767 4y ago
  Google hasn't been a trendsetter for a few years now, either (unless you count enforcing web standards with Chrome). Also, calling "relevant industry giant making heaps of money" a failure scenario is quite a stretch.
  - blibble 4y ago
    > unless you count enforcing web standards with Chrome yes, being that the web is THE current platform for technology in the same way Win32 was 20 years ago > Also, calling "relevant industry giant making heaps of money" a failure scenario is quite a stretch. I didn't call it a failure scenario IBM's making quite a lot of money still (though trending down and not nearly as much as it used to)

gjsman-1000 4y ago

Sometimes, I wonder if for the sake of small business and general good, if horizontal integration should be heavily regulated and restricted for publicly traded companies (not private ones). For example, Apple. Why aren't the software and hardware divisions separated, at a minimum? Furthermore, I might wonder, why couldn't iPhone, iPad, Mac, Audio Accessories etc. be separate companies? Sure, you'd lose a ton of the integration that makes it special... but I wonder sometimes if the world would be a better place. Same for Microsoft: Why can't Windows, Office, Azure, Xbox, all be separate companies? If Windows was an independent company I think it would probably be way healthier for Windows at this point (less Microsoft bloat)... I feel (just feel) that publicly-traded companies should be forced to pick a market segment and stick to it, and any other businesses that get too large (say, $1B revenue) must be broken off.

jeffbee 4y ago
Software-hardware coevolution has large benefits to the consumer. What you are proposing is to just make the products worse and more expensive.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  Here's the thing: That might be true, and yet, necessary for the good of society and the good of the long-term. See, for example, Standard Oil. They massively lowered oil prices - we broke them up. See also AT&T. Once their usefulness as a monopoly ran out, we broke them up. Plus, we can see that hardware-software coevolution has large benefits - but who is to say that having companies separate does not also have large benefits of its own? You might not have Windows shoving Microsoft Teams and Edge and Bing down your throat... or Apple pushing Apple Music to your parents. If Apple can't integrate, perhaps we'd have more open standards for interoperability.
kitotik 4y ago
Regulating horizontal integration seems like it would be very difficult. How exactly would those horizons be clearly defined? I’ve always thought of Apple having an emphasis on vertical integration(hardware+software=product). So maybe their foray into services would be the line in the sand?

counttheforks 4y ago

Are we ignoring that ChatGPT is stuck in the past and that continuously retraining it on current data is currently still prohibitively expensive?

mattnewton 4y ago
Yes, because this is a solvable problem probably easier than figuring out how to make it a useful product (like knowing what it doesn’t know and preventing convincing hallucinations in some scenarios while maintaining the ability to hallucinate for creative queries). There is a lot of work on approaches like using search retrieval methods like embedding similarity lookups, and then pasting summaries of the retrieved documents in as context. This allows the LLM to cite new data without retraining. (That’s also something google is very good at)

titzer 4y ago

I'm not so sure AI is as big a threat as Google perceives it to be; back in 2009 the HUGE EXISTENTIAL THREAT was Social, therefore Google+, but that came and went and Google's growth continued unabated. That said, I do see a place for language-model driven search. And I shudder to think that language models will be specifically coerced, bribed, and have ingrained in their brains only what advertisers want. If you thought the search landscape of the 2020s is fully of SEO'd crap, just wait. Google is not in an enviable position.

danjoredd 4y ago
I honestly don't think that chatgpt will destroy Google either...whenever I use search engines, I use them to find a website I could not remember the name of, locations like restaurants, etc. ChatGPT will be a tool to be used alongside search engines, not a replacement
minsc_and_boo 4y ago
The article also assumes that Google doesn't have it's own chatGPT or other AI irons in the fire right now. Google Assistant dropped a year after Alexa, and Android's reach helped bolster it's marketshare (antitrust investigation or not).
- cpeterso 4y ago
  Like Google's LaMDA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA
dylan604 4y ago
If Google is so afraid of AI, then they should have done the most Googley of things in building AI into Google to get everyone use to it, then drop it. Deprecate the crap out of it like all of the other things. Then, since Googs dropped, it must not be good right? Boom! problem solved
Zigurd 4y ago
TBF Google found they already owned a first-tier social network. It was disguised as a video sharing site. The article quotes someone as saying history repeats itself. Debatable. Google built Alphabet to be defensible against antitrust cases like this. Expect a consent decree. As you wrote: "I do see a place for language-model driven search." And unlike social media this has less dependency on user perception of whether a social network is cool.

mattnewton 4y ago

If being screwed looks like sharing Microsoft’s “fate” it sounds not bad? Especially from a shareholder perspective. And honestly while I was there, there were plenty of jokes about how this was already happening, then Google was the new Microsoft.

Spivak 4y ago

I think this is the author's wishful thinking more than anything else. Google isn't going to face some existential threat by Microsoft+OpenAI, at least not in the near term because the biggest chunk of the work to get a good AI response in a search product is retrieving good context to feed it. How do you do that? Well you need an index of the web and a good ranking algo... oh wait.

jchw 4y ago

Google is probably screwed without it. Even if ad-tech isn't exactly a bubble, I strongly believe it is overvalued even still. Furthermore, the product that made their name is thoroughly lost. I dread Google Search today. If I found something on Google yesterday, I have no idea if I'll be able to locate it through the sea of blog SPAM and SEO garbage tomorrow. Google web search strongly favors big websites when sometimes the page you need is never going to be there. As an example, Google puts heavy weight on near-SPAM sites like Pinterest which produce almost no original content, and on abusive hosts like Fandom (formerly Wikia) who manages to beat out community wikis by replacing admins that try to migrate off and winning in SEO. I am not trying to suggest Duck Duck Go or Bing are actually better overall, but if I see a web search covered in results like that, I sometimes find that they do in fact give me somewhat better result rankings. The only thing I really have any strong affection for is YouTube, and the people and content that made the platform special are constantly unhappy with it's corporate direction, not to mention the utter lack of support, claiming and affirming in appeals stupid pointless crap like "you said a naughty word in the first ten seconds of the video" when anyone with working ears can easily verify they did not. And that's the tip of the iceberg. I think a lot of ventures, like GMail, only ever made sense as computers and bandwidth just kept getting dramatically cheaper. It's difficult to beat free. Well, what happens when those things stop getting cheaper, and GMail keeps getting more expensive to run?

footlose_3815 4y ago
Devil's advocate, lots of Google services are 100% benevolent. Like Google Open Fonts. Did you know most of the font licenses packaged with Windows, you're not even allowed to package them into a game?
- kmbfjr 4y ago
  There is nothing altruistic about Google. It is all about collecting as much metadata as possible to feed the ad tech money pump. At the very least, pulling from Google for fonts, which nearly everyone does, announces the page where it begins the process.
quitit 4y ago

jeffbee 4y ago

Prompt: Write a ten-paragraph piece in the style of Gizmodo that is guaranteed to make the front page of HN.

_fat_santa 4y ago

I made this comment in another thread but I can't decide if LLM / GPT is a seismic shift in search or just a gimmick. I remember when Copilot came out last year and everyone was up in arms about how it will replace most developers, then the chatter quickly died when people realized that it's not that great outside a few specific scenarios, it just looked like it could kill the SWE industry from people that haven't been inside of it. Now it seems the same is happening with ChatGPT. While it's easy to draw conclusions based on what you've seen ChatGPT do, I wonder if it will provide long term value or be a gimmick much like Copilot, having a bunch of simple applications but fail at the more advanced applications (which would be required for it to dethrone say Google Search). Personally I think LLM/GPT will never replace the current Google search, it however will be baked into almost every search engine and allow an "alternative" way to search the web, where you get answers to simple questions right away without having to go to a website.

Sebb767 4y ago
> it however will be baked into almost every search engine and allow an "alternative" way to search the web, where you get answers to simple questions right away without having to go to a website. That's what Google does quite a lot already anyway. The difference is that Google directly cites its source and offers alternative links - which is necessary, since if you need to verify the answer with a Google search, you might as well skip asking ChatGPT (or an equivalent) beforehand. Since ChatGPT is fundamentally trained to do a different thing (word completion), I have a hard time imagining that you can sufficiently coax it into replacing an actual search. But we will see.

jqpabc123 4y ago

Maybe a part of Google's problem is it's focus on "personalized" advertising. Simple, context based advertising is much easier/simpler to implement --- no privacy invasion required. It also annoys the consumer a lot less and by some accounts is more cost effective. Amazon in a ecommerce site. If I go there and search for widgets, I should reasonably expect (and maybe even appreciate) some ads from widget makers. What I don't expect and what I find annoying is ads for widgets following me all over the internet for days; even on non-commerce sites; even after I already made my widget purchase at a brick and mortar --- aka, the Google "personalized" approach. "Personalized" ads are really kinda dumb --- but apparently Google has "sold" enough advertisers on the idea so they can charge a premium for them.

zone411 4y ago

I think the opposite: Google will do great. Google+Deepmind's ML research groups are leading everyone. While it's true that they are late in getting something like ChatGPT to market, I think it was a wakeup call and it will be good for their ad revenues once they do. When they release it, they'll know much more about users' intent than from a simple search engine query and users will stay on their properties for longer. The concerns about cost are overblown - they don't need to run it for every query.

jayd16 4y ago
Are they even late to market? I don't think the lunch has been eaten yet.
Sebb767 4y ago
> While it's true that they are late in getting something like ChatGPT to market Are they? ChatGPT is by all means a loss leader; I don't see why Google would need a halo AI product right now.
- zone411 4y ago
  Google is a public company so its shareholders want the stock price to be higher ASAP. Being an unquestionable leader in AI with a product as good as ChatGPT (and maybe an image model available to the public) would help in that goal.
  - MaxDPS 4y ago
    I really don’t think it would. Google is already number #1 in search. OpenAI is quoting a ~$40 price per month for ChatGPT Pro right? That’s not an insignificant cost for 99% of the population. I don’t see how it makes sense for Google to release something until they actually need to.

jliptzin 4y ago

I don’t understand arguments that say google will be left in the dust when it comes to AI. There’s no network effects like Facebook, it just takes a lot of money to train the models, which google obviously has. Do we really believe google, with all its resources and engineering talent, has no ability to develop something on par with OpenAI?

summerlight 4y ago
In fact Google has a bunch of SOTA LLM models, some of them are (conservatively speaking) several months ahead of OpenAI's. It's really interesting to see those people who believe (or want to see) Google being an underdog in the area of machine learning, but it's actually not. It's something similar to say that Tesla is years ahead of Waymo or Cruise.
randmeerkat 4y ago
> Do we really believe google, with all its resources and engineering talent, has no ability to develop something on par with OpenAI? Yes, they’re a large, bureaucratic organization, that’s incapable of developing new products or avenues of growth. For the sake of argument though, let’s say Google created a product on par with ChatGPT, they would just kill it after a few months like every other Google service that they’ve made.
miked85 4y ago
Google acquired DeepMind almost a decade ago. I'm not sure if anything significant has been produced yet? Maybe it has, and it's all behind the scenes.
itslennysfault 4y ago
They also already have best in class AI. Google's PaLM is a much larger model than GPT3 and even larger than most estimates of GPT4. They also have Imagen which blows the doors off of Dall-e 2. In no way is google behind OpenAI and they have access to WAAAY more training data and resources in general. Google just hasn't shipped a consumer or publicly available product with any of it yet.

flanked-evergl 4y ago

I would rather deal with Google than Microsoft or Amazon, so I hope they still have some future.

warcher 4y ago

Can somebody explain to me the existential threat AI is posing to the search business? I am familiar with ChatGPT composing reasonable sounding answers to prompts. I get that I could type in "what's the best vacuum cleaner under $500?" or something like that, and both Google and ChatGPT could generate an answer for me. But I want the best, most accurate answer, not a set of banalities that a neural network has composed to convincingly pass the sniff test. I actually care about the content being right, or as close to right as possible. I admit freely that I'm clearly missing some possibilities here. Can anyone fill me in?

evanmoran 4y ago
I'll give it go – Essentially the quality of the average website is declining due to poor incentives such as SEO optimization and content creation farms. Meanwhile, language models like ChatGPT are becoming more advanced. This presents a problem for Google, as ChatGPT will over time become more likely to provide accurate answers than a website search. Additionally, many websites will begin using ChatGPT to generate large amounts of content, making search even worse and more efficient to ask ChatGPT directly.
- ripe 4y ago
  But doesn't ChatGPT consume the same Internet as Google does? Including junk websites? The current release of ChatGPT is just old and out of date. Google could use the same criteria as ChatGPT to filter the input. Then why would search be any worse?

crazygringo 4y ago

The article doesn't seem to back up its headline at all. Google is under antitrust investigation for ads, while it talks about the threat to the company being AI. The main point of the article is: > It would be a lot easier Google could move fast and break things... But with the full force of the US government bearing down on it, the search giant can’t do that now... Google will need to conduct itself slowly and tentatively in order to avoid jeopardizing itself in its battle with the Justice Department. Sure it might need to move more slowly in its ads business (not a good time to buy an ads-related startup). But I see no evidence Google will need to act "slowly and tentatively" in terms of incorporating chatbot functionality into Search. So I don't see anything "screwing" Google about this at all, not in the least.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> Google is under antitrust investigation for ads, Its under antitrust investigation for lots of things; its currently being prosecuted in the US for ads.
thewataccount 4y ago
One of the potential issues a lot of people are speculating about is the lower impression counts. For example - when trying to write a script using some api's I'm not super familiar with, I might do 6+ google searches. This will be similar for a lot of fields when trying to find an answer to something, news, other research, etc. That means you're loading a fresh page of ads every search AND all the ads on those sites too. With chatGPT (And I'm aware Google has something similar) - I can (and have) just asked it a question, and it will answer/write entire scripts for me. That means there's only a single page load. Basically people are speculating Google may struggle to monetize a chatbot to the extent they can monetize every single search + site load. You certainly _can_ the speculation is whether the drastically lower impression counts will impact their overall profitability.
- crazygringo 4y ago
  Honestly I don't think it's going to make much of a difference. The real money is in ads that are targeted to a search -- whether you're asking Search or a chatbot for "best fleece half-zip for men" you'll get shown the same ads targeted to that. While if you're asking it to write a script for you... you probably were to busy to be even looking at or clicking the ads Google was showing anyways back when you were looking for Stack Overflow answers, no matter if it took 100 searches. (There's also nothing stopping Google from showing you 3 new ads before each new chatbot response.) I have full faith in Google figuring out how to insert just as many ads as before. ;)

alexb_ 4y ago

AI is not the issue here. There is this very large assumption that just so happens to underpin a VERY large part of the tech industry, not just Google. It is assumed that ad spending will always be worth it, ad revenue will always increase, and that the market for digital advertising and targeted digital advertising in particular will always be large enough to support the behemoth that it is today. But what happens when marketing spend goes down (as it does in a recession)? What happens when customers aren't willing to pay as much for your advertising product (as happens in a recession)? What happens when borrowed money can't be secured easily, and debts come due (once again, as happens in a recession)? Are people really ready for an economy where user data isn't massively lucrative? Are people really ready for an economy where advertising doesn't pay enough to support the "free" services we take for granted? Are people really ready for a world where free video hosting, free hard drives, free email, free cloud-run office software are not sustainable?

mollusk_bound 4y ago
Weren't all these questions answered during the great recession, It wasn't easy but Google weathered the storm. Why is any upcoming recession going to be substantially different.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
> But what happens when marketing spend goes down (as it does in a recession)? What happens when customers aren't willing to pay as much for your advertising product (as happens in a recession)? What happens when borrowed money can't be secured easily, and debts come due (once again, as happens in a recession)? Typically - what happens is - central banks lower interest rates until they're negative in real yields - and people start spending like crazy again. Who knows what will happen in the future. But that's been the previous playbook.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- smegger001 4y ago
  that only works if people A) still trust the underlying currency and B) you don't create hyperinflation. What happens in the future when the global economy isn't denominated in petrodollars?

Maursault 4y ago

> If you’ll pardon the jargon, this kind of thing is what experts refer to as a “big problem.” I really hate this kind of inscrutable industry rhetoric. Why can't they just speak plainly?

endisneigh 4y ago

People who complain about Google remind me of the meme “no one goes there anymore - it’s too full.” Google has a lot of legitimate headwinds, but honestly I don’t think antitrust or AI competitors are them. The legitimate “destruction” of legitimacy on the internet, thus making Search more error prone is an issue. Closed off ecosystems such as apple is an issue. The antitrust case is a big deal, but it’s unlikely Google would be broken up due to it.

hbn 4y ago

> Win or loose, Google is in trouble Did the recent layoff apocalypse hit Gizmodo editors too?

caconym_ 4y ago
Perhaps the author has simply chosen to discard cognitive structures that will be made redundant in the new post-literacy age of ubiquitous ML language tools. Would that we all had such vision, and the courage to act on it.

ex3xu 4y ago

Google in 1998: Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives from the original paper The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine [0] "Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users... we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers... we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm." Google in 2003: Eric "You can trust us with your data" Schmidt convinces Sergey and Larry of the bonkers amount of money they can make by adding a monopoly on digital search advertising to leverage their monopoly on digital search. They proceed to switch to the same advertising business model that hindered their early competitors. Google in 2008: Buys out Doubleclick to maintain Adsense's monopoly on digital search advertising and doubles down on surveillance capitalism. Google in 2011: Buys out AdMeld, changes AdX contracts to be even more anticompetitive to maintain monopoly on digital search advertising. Google in 2017: Loses $2.7 billion antitrust lawsuit in the EU. Response? No changes to business model, but oust a vocal supporter of the decision from Google-funded think tank New America. [1] Google in 2023: Sued again. [0] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15131370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15131370

jb1991 4y ago

Why can't Google compete in AI? They have major AI researchers with legendary experience under their belts, what is stopping Google from building something like ChatGPT to augment their search? I guess I don't understand where the threat is. They have a lot more resources than OpenAI.