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Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?
- pleb_nz 4y agoEven without AI assistance it's no longer the best search product.
- danShumway 4y agoI don't understand this hype and I feel like I'm looking at different products than everyone else is. There are very few complaints I have about Google that I think this technology helps solve, and for most of my complaints, getting summaries of searches makes the situation worse, not better. To be completely clear: even if the AI was perfect, I don't know that I want even an actual human being to sit down and summarize an answer to my question rather than show me a list of search results. The problem with search is not that our answers aren't summarized well, it's that the quality of information returned for those searches is getting increasingly worse, and we are getting increasingly worse at categorizing or filtering that information in any useful way. And LLMs pulling information in and summarizing it for me is... not helpful? It's summarizing the same garbage, except now sometimes it also summarizes it wrong. But it's not even an issue with the quality (although the quality of information from LLMs is also pretty over-hyped I think). Conceptually, I don't know that this is a product that I would ever want. I can't think of any time where I've sat down to do a search on Google or DuckDuckgo and thought, "You know what I want? I want these results presented to me in a less structured format using natural language and with less granular knowledge about where each specific statement is coming from." At least Bing seems to be trying to do inline citations in some of its answers, which is a step up over Google's AI announcement, I guess? Maybe I'm just in the minority on that. Users seem to like this a lot. But my ideal version of the Internet is one that decreases the number of abstractions and layers and summaries between myself and primary data rather than increasing them. My ideal Internet is a tool that makes it easier for me to actually find things, not a tool that increases the layers between me and the raw source/information that I'm looking for. I already have enough trouble needing to double-check news summaries of debates, events, and research. Getting another summary of the summaries doesn't seem helpful to me? I can think of some ways where I might use an LLM in search, even really exciting ways where maybe it could help with categorization or grouping, but it doesn't seem like Google/Bing are interested in pursuing any of that. I look at both the Bing and Google announcements and just think, "why are you making it worse?" But who knows, maybe the actual products will sell me on the concept more.
- emodendroket 4y agoYou know what it reminds me a lot of? CPedia. It’s basically the same concept, though, from the sound of it, much more capably executed. I do see LLMs as potentially more useful for “fanciful” queries, like “what can I make with kale, tomatoes, and mushrooms?”
- danShumway 4y agoJust for clarification, do you mean the actual encyclopedia, or Wikipedia? I think that encyclopedias are cool, but I also feel like the Internet was hopefully going to be a slightly better version of that and that it's a little frustrating to be going in the opposite direction. I'm not sure how to articulate that other than that encyclopedias are in some ways a compromise around the fact that we very often don't have good search, so we accept human beings trying to pre-aggregate data for us with the hope that they are better than Google is at aggregating that data. And I think Wikipedia is valuable not so much because of the summaries, and more because it's obsessively curated and has (or attempts to have) a very specific, predictable set of rules that it (tries) to adhere to about sources and coverage. The text-portion of Wikipedia isn't really the part that I think is most impressive about it. If GPT-3 was being used to aggressively curate search results and remove low-quality content, then yeah, that would be potentially interesting (although I'm not sure how well it could handle that task). ---- > what can I make with kale, tomatoes, and mushrooms? I sort of see it, it's one of the more... it's fine. It wouldn't be a strict downgrade over existing search, maybe it would save time in some situations. But if I'm being completely honest, what I want as an answer to that question isn't a paragraph of text explaining multiple recipes, it's a bullet-pointed list of recipes with links to the original sites they're listed on, so I can check to see if they're worth making. Bing's results (to its credit) seem like they're sort of headed in that direction, which, nice. Yeah, I could use that. But a bullet-pointed list of recipes is also... search results. So how much time and effort have we put into reinventing a cleaner search interface where at best it solves the same problems that search already solved, and where we in the meanwhile haven't made any progress on the really hard fundamental problem of "how do we get a good list of recipes to display in the first place and what does 'good' mean in that context?" ---- To be less cynical, one way I could see this genuinely being useful would be completely behind the scenes in a non-user-facing role just as a way of applying "tags" to webpages or doing filtering. I would love to be able to search "is spinach poisonous for rats who are pets and just because I used the word 'poisonous' does not mean I want 2 pages of links about exterminators or getting rid of wild rats." An LLM would be a great fit for that, because we've done such a garbage job of categorizing the web that it's very difficult to know which words to type to exclude "categories" of information from a search query. So maybe an LLM helps standardize that a bit? But then I want a normal page of search results. I don't want to have a conversation with the LLM, I want the LLM's role to be exclusively "I think this webpage should be additionally included/excluded in your query. I think this webpage is about extermination even if it doesn't use that specific word." If Bing's service ends up being able to do that kind of thing well, then yeah, that's useful. I'm a little skeptical they can, because... gestures to the current quality of search results, but maybe their integration with GPT gives them way more capabilities and ratchets up their quality. But similar to above, it feels a little bit like reinventing the wheel. I can refine GPT queries during a conversation, great. Could I have that feature for regular search? Why do I need to do it as part of a conversation? That seems like a good thing tied to a bad UX (although again, I might be atypical in thinking that natural language conversations are often bad UX). And I do want to couch that by saying that maybe Bing will surprise me and it will have easy options to do that kind of thing. I'm just not currently seeing it presented in a way that looks useful.
- dontreact 4y agoI would bet money that the answer here is no
- cwilby 4y agoGood odds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
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- marginalia_nu 4y agoYeah, people underestimate Google. They have a really compelling package that is hard to replace, especially how well they understand local queries. That as well as strong funneling factors in place, Chrome and Android being some of the biggest.
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- rafaelturk 4y agoWell I'm done with Google, looking forward ChatGPT and Bing being serious competition
- karmasimida 4y agoNo Unless Bard sucks too much
- marricks 4y agoI think it’s interesting to consider why touchscreen mobile phones won out over their predecessors. Touchscreens are the worst interface option. The feedback of feeling a button, or anything made for the job, is better than typing without specific feedback onto a screen. It won out because of you don’t have a set interface it’s bettor. Now for search, chat gpt will likely always be less reliable than a list of results you can vet yourself for content and source. That said… I don’t think people care about truth that much these days so one response that feels correct is could be good enough for most. Terrifying times we live in folks.
- bobthepanda 4y agoTouchscreen keyboards disappear and free up their real estate. That’s the main advantage on phones.
- marricks 4y agoYep! And people just want big screens to view content.
- doctor_eval 4y agoWell what else are we supposed to do with them?
- humanizersequel 4y ago>Touchscreens are worse than buttons Hottest take I've seen on here for a while. In a very specific, very limited set of mobile usecases, buttons may offer a more pleasant experience than a touchscreen. I only say that because there's usually exceptions to any statement, but I can't actually think of one. Touchscreens didn't win because of some lazy sheep-like consumerism, they won because the product is superior. If Chat-GPT style models defeat traditional search engines it will be because the product is better, not because people are content with a response that "seems correct."
- 4y ago
- chias 4y agoWhile Google certainly has its faults and I am frustrated with its trajectory, I would bet money that this is an article pushing the nonsensical notion that AI language models will replace search engines. Edit: based on the subtitle, it seems like I am correct.
- rileyphone 4y agoHow is that nonsensical? Seems quite likely to me, especially if they can ground them better in a factual knowledge base. Most search engine queries are looking for information.
- phailhaus 4y agoThe problem is that this literally does not exist today. ChatGPT is a chatbot, it has no factual knowledge base. It's optimized for dialogue. That's why it's absolutely nonsensical to see all these articles, because they are talking about a chatbot as if it's trivial to turn it into a search machine. That's an entirely different problem.
- candiodari 4y agoChatGPT is pretty much the definition of a troll. It's only mission in life is to keep you talking to it. To do that it has no problem with lying, confusing, and various other deceitful methods you wouldn't accept from a human.
- notahacker 4y agoMost of the information people are looking for isn't really the sort of thing an LLM is set up to cover though. If I want information on anything since 2021, or to look into stuff near me, or access a price, a download, or information in visual form, or anything that's too niche for its corpus, ChatGPT is not good. When ChatGPT can offer an answer it's fast, but about as reliable as a search engine's spammiest result And answers as text wrapped around a factual knowledge base just sounds like the sort of queries Google Home already handles in natural language form. That can certainly be improved upon, but it isn't obvious that the LLM engineers will beat the search engineers to it...
- Invictus0 4y agoDo you people really want AI generated answers? As if the internet wasn't bland enough as it is. This forum has been soapboxing for years about the longtail of blogs and BBs and niche sites, right up to the moment that Bing got chatgpt.
- chomp 4y agoI just want Google to fall, nothing much more than that. I personally am going to continue using Kagi, but will quietly cheer Microsoft eating Google's lunch.
- fdgsdfogijq 4y agoI would love to see google fail. They have held the internet hostage for far too long
- LightDub 4y agoHow old are you? I don't mean this to be offensive. It's just I remember when the same was said about Microsoft when Google was up and coming. I really am getting old ...
- chomp 4y agoLate 30s. Yes I realize that me 20 years ago would find a lot of distaste in my current position. However, from my point of view, Google is causing a lot more present day harm than Microsoft is. Microsoft has been reduced to the point of having to ship Google's browser, and offering products with Linux support. Google is in no such position, and continues to use anti competitive tactics to vertically integrate, to create a landscape that is favorable to their ad machine. I realize that this is an unpopular opinion, but there ya go. If/when Bing gains dominance and starts abusing its position, I'll probably change positions, but that's the way it goes when there's a lack of competition in the market. You're left cheering for the best of the worst.
- ranting-moth 4y agoPeople want answers. Google isn't giving them answers. If you ask google a question then an awful lot of the time the majority of top 10 results will be promoting or selling stuff.
- rexreed 4y agoJudging from the decreasing quality of Google Search I'd say they've been doing it to themselves over the past decade regardless of large language models or not. However, that being said, Google is still super dominant and when people say "SEO" they generally mean Google search results. And until my mom stops using Google as the default search, I wouldn't count them out of being the dominant search engine for some time.
- RosanaAnaDana 4y agoThe gaming of SEO has been quietly destroying the utility of search writ large as a mechanism for quite a while. Over the last year, its become palpable. Google has such utility in this regard that in some cases, a hallucinating lie-machine offers better answer than an index of what information is available on the internet. This issue with with Googles failure to respond to the deluge of SEO driven content in their searches. They can do better. They've chosen to not do so.
- doctor_eval 4y ago> This issue with with Googles failure to respond to the deluge of SEO driven content in their searches. I’d argue that they even encouraged it.
- cjbgkagh 4y agoit sells more ads at a higher price
- blantonl 4y agoThis is a fair argument to make. Normalizing web site metadata (which is essentially what SEO is) resulted in Google getting crowdsourced work done for them for free. It has been a self-fulfilling positive feedback loop since then.
- krisroadruck 4y agoBeen working in SEO for nearly 13 years now - can confirm, a lot of SEO content spam is quite literally Googles fault. Google has forced just about every company to become a publisher as the only way to generate traffic to their site. I promise you the vast majority of companies don't want to spend the money pump out 4-30 pieces of mostly remixed/regurgitated content a month or screw around trying to attract links but this is how the algo works and you get what you measure.
- basch 4y agoExactly. Every time someone with a business says "I want to get to the top of google" the person they are asking for help will respond with some jargony version of "you gotta constantly write content." It is the ONLY answer. And unfortunately Google has become worse than ever at being able to differentiate between insight and fluff.
- marcopicentini 4y agoIt's been a while since they stopped innovating. Although Google, Maps, Youtube are of daily use they are monetized exclusively by advertising which is annoying and hated by many. It has been many years since Google has launched an innovative new product. I don't think ChatGPT will gain daily traction after this hype. Anyway we could say that MSFT and AMZN have demostrated more power to innovate with different business models (not only adv) and products. The GOOG stock has a PE (Price/earning) of 23, while Coca cola 26. So the stock market expect higher growth from CocaCola than Google. Quite surprising. - GOOGLE PE (23): https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/pe-ratio https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/pe-... - COCA COLA PE (26): https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/KO/cocacola/pe-ratio https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/KO/cocacola/pe-rat...
- alexfromapex 4y agoIt's honestly shocking that it's had such a long run. An increase in high quality ways to sift through information will be a net benefit for society.
- swayvil 4y agoI actually prefer Bing these days. (And I don't even run Windows) Google search results are just screwy. Probably all that money is interfering with the algorithm.
- josefresco 4y agoLet us think about the defaults in our life: Windows: Most use Chrome (Google default), the rest use Edge (Bing default). MacOS: Safari (Google default) and Chrome (Google default) Android: Chrome (Google default) iOS: Safari (Google default) So it looks like the only vulnerability here would be iOS and then possibly PC/MacOS if enough users switch their browser.
- lyu07282 4y agoyou should also consider that Google is/was the best search engine around so it makes sense as a default, sure they pay to be the default and most people never change defaults. But if you are making a phone you might just really actually care about people having a good experience with your phone. (and its not like Microsoft couldn't pay them either anyway)
- josefresco 4y ago4-5 years ago I would have agreed. But I've been using DDG for my primary search and only "resort" to using Google maybe 10-15% of the time my search fails on DDG. I'm not saying DDG is amazing, only that you don't need a "Mercedes" to pick up milk.
- bloblaw 4y agoAll good points. Windows still very much dominates desktops / laptops sold (especially large corp environments)...so the default installed Edge browser + Bing is a significant share of users. And with Edge being "basically chrome", and supporting Chrome plugins, the switching cost from Chrome -> Edge is quite small. But for mobile, Android + iOS dominate...so that all goes to Google. I think this could mean that Bing + ChatGPT has a really opportunity to beat Google in Search...it's gonna be hard, but I've never even considered them more than a distant 2nd option until now.
- dilap 4y agoMicrosoft's integration of ChatGPT with Bing is really bad. No-one wants a busy search page with a side-bar of ChatGPT; what's the point of that? The correct interface for ChatGPT + search is just...ChatGPT. But it can also show you a list of web search results, when it's appropriate. A super-clean interface, that always shows you exactly what you want. That would be a killer feature and represent a real threat to Google.
- goatlover 4y agoAs long as it's easy to see the list of web results so I can go there instead of just relying on the model. Also because there are reasons to go to sites other than just getting a summary. Like maybe you need or want to use that site to do something.
- RockyMcNuts 4y agoI haven't seen anything like Bing + ChatGPT since the Road Runner's rocket powered roller skates.
- mattwad 4y agoAs someone else said, the problem is ChatGPT lies straight to your face, whereas at least Google's answers are based on structured data by someone. It's traceable, whereas I would not trust ChatGPT ever to tell me the correct temperature to cook a steak.
- jurmous 4y agoI don’t know if you saw screenshots of the Prometheus model inside Bing. But it presents the sources with all its answers. It is no ChatGPT but a new model created for search.
- wcoenen 4y ago"The new Bing also cites all its sources". That's a quote from the microsoft announcement. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/02/07/reinventing-search-with-a-new-ai-powered-microsoft-bing-and-edge-your-copilot-for-the-web/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/02/07/reinventing-sear...
- theonlybutlet 4y agoBing is my default on my work and home PC as I use edge, I've been too lazy to change it. For the most part, whenever I accidentally search something on Bing, I end up having to open up Google and search it again. Their results are still way better.
- jasmer 4y agoYes and no. Yes, finally we are going to see a shift, but their 'dominance' is not going to necessarily change that much in some kind of 'step function'. I suggest that Siri is about to get a lot better, and act more like we wanted it to act a decade ago. As amazing as ChatGPT is, it's actually not that useful for most regular people other than as a more human form of search. I think Google results will improve quickly enough that whatever MS does will seem novel but not necessarily have some kind of huge consumer impact. We'll see search for company info and help directories get a lot better. Remember that both MS and Google are 'etablished' companies, the later a bit slow moving and not firing on all fronts. Why would anyone think a company that can't get Skype to work, is going to marvel the world with some 'new thing'. OpenAI folks are on a roll, rapidly trying to make cool looking experiments, focused on 'wowing the world' not on direct revenues. Making that translate into products is another dimension altogether. The most interesting stuff will come from startups.
- saudade97 4y agoI don't get the HN hate of Google as a search tool. Yes, SEO has made searching more difficult, but Google is still by far the best search engine provided that your searches are focused and you use search tools (e.g., excluding terms, focusing on certain sites, etc.). I've tried other search engines (e.g., DDG, Bing) and they just aren't as good as Google.
- tester756 4y ago>your searches are focused are what? >I don't get the HN hate of Google as a search tool. Yes, SEO has made searching more difficult, but Google is still by far the best search engine provided that your searches are focused and you use search tools (e.g., excluding terms, focusing on certain sites, etc.). I've tried other search engines (e.g., DDG, Bing) and they just aren't as good as Google. What if their search is better just because way, way way more people use it?
- emodendroket 4y agoWhat if indeed? What does that imply to you? I don’t really care why it is so much better so long as it is.
- OJFord 4y agoI've used DDG exclusively for about 10 years, it's good enough that I don't realise I'm missing out.
- ranting-moth 4y agoMany of the HN crowd remember when Google came into existence and how wonderful it was. If it existed on the internet, Google would find it for you and it was usually the top resault. It was amazing. Today, it's a shadow of its former self. You regularly have to search, wade through the ads that are written like informative articles, adjust your query slightly and repeat the process. It's rubbish.
- jeffbee 4y agoWhat these people are remembering is when the web was small and dorks-only. Now it is huge and full of normies of all kinds, including every shade of commercialism and fraud.
- guyzero 4y agoConsidering people still go to Bing just to type "Google" I think the answer is no.
- charlie0 4y agoI wonder if MS can query and see the pain of people just searching for the Google Chrome download link, downloading it, closing Edge and never opening it ever again.
- fdgsdfogijq 4y agoHow could they have left such a massive gap in their product. They literally have the model and resources to revolutionize search. We all know LLMs will hurt their ad revenue, but regardless they have to have known this was coming. This is so similar to FB getting caught off guard by TikTok. There was a gap in the utility of their product (TikTok enabled grass roots content creation), and they just left it wide open. Its some combination of: 1. ChatGPT is so much better than previous versions that Google themselves was stunned by the utility. 2. Incompetence/Gross negligence across Google 3. No way for them to reconcile the lost ad revenue, so they released nothing. This case is hard to argue for, as they would know theyre a sitting duck. Regardless I am hoping for a massive Google failure. Theyre the ones responsible for the SEO content waste land that is the modern internet. We have all suffered at the feet of their ad machine
- hgsgm 4y ago4. Google Search already has lots of useful AI already in it, but Google didn't want to integrate a racist, confabulating chatbot, forgetting that modern users have no preference for truth over lies. Why are you blaming Google for not being perfect while making the best free search engine, after you spent your whole life refusing to pay for a non-free one?
- fdgsdfogijq 4y agoIf OpenAI is willing to release it and Microsoft invested 10B, I have a very hard time believing that censoring the model is impossible. Microsoft 100% did their due diligence on the model. Google is a monopoly, there is nothing anyone can do. Their search engine and business model has structured the internet and thus society. This thing needs to die
- ESMirro 4y agoThis is the same Microsoft that had to close down their Twitter AI “Tay” after a single day because it immediately became a “racist asshole” (as per The Verge) in 2016? The same OpenAI ran by Sam Altman, who just last year was part of a crypto biometric scam called “Worldcoin” that attempted to collect biometric data from some of the worlds poorest in exchange for a shitcoin? I’m sure they’ve done their due diligence and aren’t just pushing out a broken product as quickly as possible after it went viral because they saw dollar signs…
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- acqbu 4y agohttps://archive.is/0ULyU https://archive.is/0ULyU
- FridgeSeal 4y agoI do not understand the appeal or gpt-powered searches. Most of my web searches are for looking up specific things, to find the specific link(s) that contains the information I need. These aren’t searches that are going to be made better or faster by an ML model-they’re not natural language queries, they’re just a bunch of terms.
- ghshephard 4y agoDepends on your use case - if you are coding, or doing constraint analysis - 75+% of the time it's a single request, single answer, and you are done. The other element with ChatGPT is if you aren't happy with the initial answer for some reason - you can engage in a conversation with it, provide some guidance, and will adjust it to suit specifically what you are interested in. I've found about 50% of my google searches just go straight to ChatGPT these days. Hallucinations are the only real problem I've had - but over time you start to become cynical about the truth of anything factual - asking for unit tests helps quite a bit when coding - double checking any math is also important. I do agree though, that without citations to the original source - any "Facts" that ChatGPT offers are absolutely untrustworthy.
- helf 4y agoI think because people want to natural language ask questions to a virtual butler (Jeeves) and get an answer back in digestible natural language form. I… don’t really get it either. But I’m also a cranky person who can’t stand every damn thing being a video whether it makes sense for the content or not, etc.
- zerocrates 4y agoAs someone else said, I think a surprisingly (overwhelmingly?) large amount of queries are just questions people want answered, or close to them, and not really "search queries" in the traditional sense of text people are looking for on a page somewhere. Even before this, you've seen the search engines add features to cater to that kind of use, things like Siri handing off questions it didn't understand to a search engine (as well as the other assistants that can do that), indications of this behavior in how companies like Google show themselves being used in ads. Of course, regardless of the true prevalence of that behavior, it's probably in Google et al.'s favor to encourage that. Regular search sort of inherently cedes some power and control to the pages the results are coming from, where you're sending users away to if their answer isn't right in the snippet. But the "answer box" features, or an LLM that just tells you "the answer to your question" directly on the page keeps you there, treating the search page as your source of information and not somewhere else.
- lvl102 4y agoChatGPT is still a novelty. People will kick tires etc but utility is just not there yet.
- bloblaw 4y agoSimilar statements have been made about most dominant technology when it was in its infancy. You are not wrong, but it can quickly go from novelty to necessity once folks start to rely on it.
- lvl102 4y agoDo you see yourself relying on it? Not when you know it’s KNOWN to give wrong answers. It’s also worth mentioning that Google PageRank was not the first search engine. No, it was good 4-5 years after the first usable search engine came to market. I think the same will be true for AI chat.
- stevenhuang 4y agoIt excels at conversational style pedagogy when exploring new topics.
- lvl102 4y agoHow can you say that with a straight face? It’s a regurgitation of things it’s collected from the WWW. It is a step up from Siri/Alexa but completely lacks actual conversational skills.
- krapp 4y agoYou've just described most actual human conversation on the internet.
- stevenhuang 4y agoIf you don't put in an honest effort to give it a shot, you will remain forever confused why people find tech like this useful for some use cases and you don't.
- photochemsyn 4y agoIf Google were ever to remove the 'verbatim' option (which is lacking in other search engines like Bing as far as I can tell) it would become much less useful. Unfortunately, one cannot enable both 'time' and 'verbatim' option under Tools in Google Search. I guess I should go ask ChatGPT why that is the case...
- 29athrowaway 4y agoThis is not a real phenomenon, but the ad revenue from this article will.
- ilc 4y agoPeople seem to forget: AI is about data, the ability to process it, and having a few smart folks to do algorithms. The third part is actually the smallest and easiest part of the trilogy for AI. Google, has all three. The real question is can they not shoot themselves in the foot while doing it. Also SEO will always target the market leader. As far as Bing's results: I keep thinking Google is trashy. Then I use Bing and I remember just how good Google is. That's my personal opinion. I am NOT going to claim they are SEO, and spam immune, far from. But they seem to do better than Bing in getting what I mean right. ChatGPT may help MS, but is it a bandaid? Is it just a good PR bump? Who knows... Displacing Google is a large task.. and not one I'm sure I want MS to win. But I look forward to them trying, if only to make Google do better.
- amelius 4y ago> People seem to forget: AI is about data, the ability to process it, and having a few smart folks to do algorithms. The third part is actually the smallest and easiest part of the trilogy for AI. MS has them all three too. And since, as you say, the algorithm part is not the most difficult part, others may enter the playing field soon (we already have DDG and Kagi, for example, with Kagi now experimenting with LLMs too).
- ilc 4y agoThe compute side needs to be solved with money. That may be a hurdle for DDG/Kagi. MS has the money. Data is by far and away the hardest part, and DDG's own privacy policies etc will hurt it here, alas. Personally, I think it is Google's race to win. But they have to DO it. If I start getting better results off DDG or Bing, I'll switch. I'm fickle, and own no loyality to Google. I just want my StackExchange answers faster, before Google Coder, and Co-Pilot replace me. /s
- charlie0 4y agoI think enough people will get sick enough of the ads that they will be willing to pay a few bucks a month to avoid it.
- paulpauper 4y agoIt's way too premature to say that ChatGPT will overtake Google, not to mention Google still derives about half of its income from Youtube and 3rd party publisher ads. Every few years the media runs with some story about how Bing, Yahoo or whatever will overtake Google. Never even comes close.
- jsnell 4y ago> Google still derives about half of its income from Youtube and 3rd party publisher ads Their Q4 2022 revenue was $76B [0]. YouTube + 3p ads were a combined $16.5B. That's about 20%, not about half. [0] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q4_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q4_alphabet_earnings...
- chem83 4y agoMicrosoft's insistence on reusing the bing brand and website is baffling to me. No one wants to use that shit, but in classical Microsoft fashion, they're too attached to old decisions. What a missed opportunity to do like they did with IE and kill it in favor or something new and fresh. Ultimately, Microsoft will make it easier for Google to catch up because its internal culture is and will continue to be unchanged, no matter how much technology they inject from OpenAI. Make no mistake, behind the shiny PR, it's still the messy Bing AI organization, the demoralized Microsoft Research organization and good ol' Microsoft.
- siva7 4y agoSo i tried Bing again after almost a decade for their ChatGTP integration. I can't be the only one who thought this is Yahoo/AltaVista/Lycos/etc. revisited. It's a fucking portal spamming me with news coverage, not a search engine
- emodendroket 4y agoCan you even use it? I thought you had to be admitted first.
- stephc_int13 4y agoGoogle is already a zombie company, and has been for some time, still insanely rich and powerful, but they're not cool anymore and I think they could be replaced very easily. Large corporations can seemingly stay alive and kicking for a long time after their death. Nokia, Kodak, Palm, RIM just to name a few. I've witnessed the demise of Palm, then Nokia and RIM, following similar patterns, when they start reacting it is already over. RIP Google.
- jay_kyburz 4y agoI don't want an AI trained on the sea of garbage that is the modern web to answer my questions, but I would love an AI to draw on a curated, hand crafted, trusted database of the worlds knowledge.
- endisneigh 4y agoI’d be curious to hear from someone who has a non trivial amount of money shorting Google. Anyone can say Google sucks.
- meindnoch 4y agoI'm $5k short GOOG at 10x leverage.
- tootie 4y agoBetteridge's law right here. I don't see how ChatGPT is going to do anything in the search space and it's stunning to see people tripping over themselves to declare Microsoft the winner already. I'm already predicting they will write down this acquisition for a few billion in 2 or 3 years. AI question and answer searches have existed for a while. Alexa does an equivalent job as ChatGPT and I find it to rarely be useful. Google's stroke of genius was to skip curation and algorithmic ranking in favor of a heuristic. Namely, PageRank. I know it's gone through years of refinement, tuning and tinkering, but the fundamental basis of popularity is just a way more reliable and durable approach than trying to intuit what people want based on what's on the page. You'd absolute be back to dark days of blackhat SEOs bombing results by inundating GPT with keywords. It won't work. The popularity model works with and only with a network effect of having zillions of successful searches to mine. Maybe Bing has just enough data to be useful and maybe ChatGPT can do a marginally better job of giving boxed answers to specific questions, but that's not the thing that makes search valuable.
- sys32768 4y agoMaybe what we need is an all-seeing AI browser plug-in that transforms and decrapifies the SERPS and sites themselves.
- gcanyon 4y agoI'm old enough that I remember switching between Yahoo, AskJeeves, AltaVista, and others, before abandoning them all for Google. I also remember experimenting with a friend to test the search engines, and I remember the question/query I used to perform the test: I had (at the time) a vague recollection that the level of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans near the Panama Canal is different; that in addition to raising ships over the isthmus, the canal has to raise them overall in one direction, and lower them in the other. That seems bizarre, since the oceans are connected south of South America, but that was my memory, so I asked the search engines. Google was the one engine that returned sites that confirmed my vague memory. So of course, I just tried this with ChatGPT. It glitched mid-response, but here's the entire exchange: Me: Is the level of the ocean the same on both sides of the Panama Canal? ChatGPT: No, the ocean level is not the same on both sides of the Panama Canal. The Panama Canal is a man-made waterway that connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, and its locks raise and lower ships to accommodate differences in sea level between the two oceans. -- Load failed -- I hit retry The Atlantic Ocean side of the canal is higher than the Pacific Ocean side, with a difference in elevation of approximately 26 meters (85 feet). This difference in elevation is compensated for by a system of locks, which raise and lower ships to the appropriate level for transit through the canal. The locks fill with water from the higher ocean and drain into the lower ocean, allowing ships to pass from one ocean to the other without having to navigate significant differences in sea level. Me: Why is the level of the ocean different? ChatGPT: The difference in sea level between the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the Panama Canal is due to various geological and oceanographic factors. One of the main reasons is the shape of the landmass and ocean basins. The Atlantic Ocean is relatively shallow and has a broader continental shelf, while the Pacific Ocean is deeper and has a narrower shelf. This shape influences the ocean currents and tides, and helps to maintain a difference in sea level between the two oceans. Another factor is the prevailing winds and currents in the region. The trade winds in the Pacific and the prevailing westerlies in the Atlantic both play a role in shaping the sea levels on their respective sides of the canal. Additionally, the location of the Panama Canal at the narrowest point of the Central American isthmus has a significant impact on the difference in sea level between the two oceans. The geography of the region funnels ocean currents and water into the narrow channel, leading to differences in water pressure and sea level on either side. In summary, the difference in sea level between the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the Panama Canal is due to a combination of geological and oceanographic factors, including the shape of the landmass and ocean basins, prevailing winds and currents, and the geography of the region. -- comment -- Although ChatGPT is correct that the levels differ, it is wrong about the amount: it's nowhere near 85 feet. It gives believable reasons for the difference, but doesn't mention tides, which (as I understand it) are a significant factor. It also doesn't mention salinity, which (again, as I understand it) is also a factor. I gave it a chance to catch the error: Me: Is the difference really 85 feet? ChatGPT: The difference in elevation between the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the Panama Canal is approximately 26 meters, or approximately 85 feet. However, it's worth noting that this figure can vary slightly due to tides, seasonal changes, and other factors. The exact difference in elevation can also depend on the specific location within the canal, as some areas may be slightly higher or lower than others. Nevertheless, the difference in elevation between the two sides is typically around 85 feet. -- Comment -- No luck correcting that 85 feet number. I also asked about tides and salinity: Me: Do tides or salinity contribute to the difference? ChatGPT: Tides and salinity can contribute to the difference in sea level between the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the Panama Canal, but the main factor is the shape of the landmass and ocean basins, the prevailing winds and currents, and the geography of the region. Tides do have an impact on the sea level in the canal, as they can cause fluctuations in the water level on both sides. However, the impact of tides on the difference in sea level between the two oceans is relatively small compared to the other factors mentioned above. Salinity can also influence the sea level, as differences in salinity can cause water to expand or contract, leading to changes in sea level. However, the impact of salinity on the difference in sea level between the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the Panama Canal is also relatively small, as differences in salinity in the canal are primarily caused by fresh water inputs from rivers and rainfall, rather than differences in ocean salinity. In summary, while tides and salinity can contribute to the difference in sea level in the Panama Canal, the main factor is the shape of the landmass and ocean basins, the prevailing winds and currents, and the geography of the region. -- Comment -- Much has been made of ChatGPT's (sometimes unfounded) confidence. I don't know enough about the ocean-level subject to judge here. Clearly ChatGPT is confident, but is it correct? I don't know. Given that a quick Google search wasn't able to convince me that ChatGPT is wrong (apart from the 85 feet thing) I'm calling this even on the facts. The experience asking ChatGPT was clearly easier than Google.
- outside1234 4y agoNo
- Bhilai 4y agoSorry to break it to you folks but if you hated your data being with Google, you are in for a surprise on how atrociously bad Microsoft is at privacy and security. Multiple close friends who have worked at Microsoft tell me that search history data - who is searching what, is basically sitting in systems with ACLs so bad that 20-30K employees have access through transitive membership of groups. To access a customer's data you just need to know token which is logged everywhere and is apparently very easy to generate. I have heard horror stories from them about privacy incidents which never went public. From what I know about Google, they are serious about least privilege type of stuff internally and employees dont get arbitrary unbound access to systems or data.
- revskill 4y agoIt's not much about Microsoft. At least it improved human life in serious ways (Typescript, VSCode,...). What did Google bring to my life ? Nothing except for spam stuffs from Ad, Email,... You're responsible for your data, not Google, not Microsoft.
- kareemsabri 4y agoI can't imagine thinking typescript improved human life more than Google Search
- amartya916 4y agoWhile it might be fashionable to hate on Google, the question "What did Google bring to my life" seems really odd. I can't believe I have to say this but search, and more importantly good/fast search, is to Google's credit. Typescript and VSCode all have, and will continue to have alternatives, but for a long time, Google was (some may argue it still is) the bleeding edge of search. Anyway, there might be a generational thing at play here, if so, I meant no condescension.
- kikokikokiko 4y agoThe quality of Google search has decreased so much over the last few years that I had to resort to using Yandex, a company that has a budget that is orders of magnitude smaller that the Big G and is under the control of a dictatorship. Google search has two huge problems: SEO and censorship. Search for anything related to products/torrents/streams/politics on Google and your results will SUCK, due to one of the two reasons stated above. The recent Yandex hack/leak has the cynic in me connecting the dots and, seeing how Google search seems to be facing REAL threats to it's dominance since it's creation... maybe some guys with the deepest pockets in the world are starting to enter WAR mode. Destroying Yandex advantages on the SEO battlefield by way of divulging their parameters to the world would be the Franz Ferdinand assassination moment of the Great Search War.
- rvz 4y agoNo. The one to end Google’s search dominance is an open source ChatGPT alternative. That will disrupt both Google, Bing and OpenAI. It’s that simple.
- valley_guy_12 4y agoThe article starts, "Nestled in the hills of Mountain View", which is worrisome, because as anyone with even a passing familiarity with Silicon Valley geography knows, Mountain View is mostly flat. And Google's Mountain View offices are located on reclaimed baylands, which are especially flat. I wonder if the article authors were thinking of Xerox PARC's offices in Palo Alto's hills? Or the road named "Sand Hill Road" that used to have some venture capitalist offices? Other than those offices I can't think of any significant hill-based offices in Silicon Valley.
- belval 4y agoThe Economist is British so it's possible the person writing this has never been to the Bay Area and just made a wordplay based on "Mountain View".
- Dalewyn 4y agoJournalists writing bullshit straight out of their asses is certainly nothing new in this day and age.
- Phiwise_ 4y agoI do think there is worse bullshit to be concerned by than whether or not a British tech writer has physically stood in Mountain View, though. I thought the beauty of the internet was in reducing the significance of that sort of thing.
- foobiekr 4y agoShoreline is kind of hilly even if the hills are landfill.
- rconti 4y ago"Smelly hills of Shoreline" doesn't have quite the same ring to it
- kazinator 4y ago> Once trained on this giant corpus of natural language, the chatbot can, when prompted by users’ instructions, produce a fluently written answer rather than merely serving up a list of links. A word salad of untrustworthy bullshit instead of the pages you were looking for is not going to upend search. It's not a replacement for search in any way. Now if the search engine could find pages which satisfy complex queries in natural language, referencing content and relationships among content, that could be something.
- friend_and_foe 4y agoBut google (nor bing) return the pages you're looking for even close to as reliably now as they did before. If Microsoft can somehow work out the issues with factual accuracy in the gpt interface (and salvage the bing brand) they're going to have a winning product on their hands.
- kazinator 4y agoUsers sometimes want a factual answer. Usually they want to go to a page. Pages are not just sources of information. People interact with pages to do real stuff connected with off-line activities. E.g. chatty paragraph won't connect me with the government/medical/banking/restaurant/shopping/whatever page I'm too lazy to search for through its own URL and portal. At best, you can have this: if it looks like the user is typing a question into the search box, an AI-generated side bar can complement the answers. The web search side of it cannot go away, otherwise you just have a sophisticated Eliza. If I'm going to see a factual answer, I want external references for those facts before I trust it. I'm likely not a subject matter expert, if I'm asking about something; I can't tell when the AI is bullshitting. Now if the AI-powered search engine had an intelligent index of all the texts of all the crawled web pages such it could do some basic reasoning about it to serve up those pages based on sophisticated questions (and not simply serve up original prose based on those texts), that could be a game changer.
- ElectricSpoon 4y agoMy fear is that more AI will hinder our ability to literally search for stuff. The future I dread includes more profiling, a stronger search bubble, all of which will just make it the death of the objective search engine. As fascinating as AI can be, I don't think it's what search engines are missing. That is certainly not what I need. Even today, engines rank your results by geoip, trying to be smarter than you ask them to be. Two individuals doing the same quoted search will get different results. Perhaps I'm just getting old, but I do miss when searching was a matter of writing a good query, not a matter of what the engine thinks you will want to ask next and what else might interest you.
- CatWChainsaw 4y agoYou have more common sense than the majority of this salivating crowd.
- Ingaz 4y agoI think that ChatGPT3 does not matter a lot. But a lot of people fed up with Google and will be glad to try something different. It's like when Apple came and eat 15-20% of market of notebooks. Dominance of Microsoft still not ended. Actually I suspect that Yandex search is better - I like how they preview answers for technical questions. Picture search - seems that Google is the worst. Maybe it's time to start search different topics in different engines. Hm. Actually AI could help to implement such functionality
- gopalv 4y ago> a lot of people fed up with Google and will be glad to try something different. I had to use DuckDuckGo to locate some mailing list threads (about an apache jira issue) which were clearly on Google at least a few years ago. So "hdfs forward seek" in Google returns nothing, but DDG does. If Google isn't repurposing all its search compute to something else secret, I can't explain why it suddenly got all dumb and forgetful of the 2015s internet.
- donkeybeer 4y agoIts very strange. There are many cases I noticed where I double quote search a string and it yields no results but once I do "my query" site:thesiteiknowitsfrom.com it gives the results.
- wrinkl3 4y agoYandex Search is decent, but over-indexed on Russian content. They’ve also suffered major brain drain since the war began so I don’t expect them to keep up with the AI arms race.
- NayamAmarshe 4y ago> But a lot of people fed up with Google and will be glad to try something different. Why would they replace Google with another bloated adware search engine then? I used to be one of these people, not going to lie, but Bing is worse than Google when it comes to UX. The results are not as high quality, bloated and really messy UI. I switched to DDG and then Brave Search later on and I can honestly say that Brave Search gets a lot of things right. Mainly the results quality and the clean UI and widgets.
- khoobid_shoma 4y agoI asked ChatGPT that if it can replace Google search engine. It says : "As an AI language model, I do not have opinions or personal thoughts. However, it is unlikely that chatbots like ChatGPT will replace traditional search engines like Google in the near future. While chatbots like me can provide quick answers to specific questions and engage in conversational interactions, they still have limitations and are not as comprehensive or efficient as search engines like Google. Google and other search engines have access to vast amounts of information and use complex algorithms to deliver relevant and accurate results. That being said, chatbots like me can complement traditional search engines by providing an alternative, more conversational interface for accessing information. Additionally, advances in natural language processing and AI technology may lead to chatbots becoming more sophisticated and capable of handling more complex tasks in the future."
- s-xyz 4y agoHave the feeling that we are in a state of overreacting (news outlets love the headlines). In addition, my gut feeling says that Google does things better than Microsoft. This comes from my experience with working with Google and GCP products vs working with Microsoft Office/Windows and Azure. With Google, everything feels consistent, well documented and well presented: from Meet/Gmail to BigQuery, Tensorflow, Cloud SQL, Firebase, etc. With Microsoft I frequently observe inconsistencies in design patterns, broken links and outdated documentation. Just compare for example Office products, the concept of Office 365, Live Account vs Outlook account, Windows, Bing, Azure products, etc. Basically its hard to find any commonality and it feels that there is generally a lack of vision for the entire suit. I therefore extrapolate that Google will answer this hype in a more structured way, anchored to a vision, putting it against a grand scheme of things and deliver it as a seemingly integrated solution to the suite.
- juve1996 4y agoI agree in general that Microsoft leaves a lot to be desired. But Google's product track record has been abysmal lately. Based on their horrible live event today, it seems like things are not so grand behind the scenes there anymore.
- scubadude 4y agoIf anything kills Google search it's the ads. Search for a product and the first page can entirely be ads or sales links. You have to specifically search to find reviews (many of which are likely paid reviews), and search even harder to find actual real user reports. Typically I add "site:reddit.com" to the end of any search where I want to read people's opinions of a product.
- NayamAmarshe 4y ago> Typically I add "site:reddit.com" to the end of any search where I want to read people's opinions of a product. Brave Search natively shows you reddit discussions on every search query. You can give that a try as well.
- mgh2 4y ago> For generative ai to make real money, it will need to find uses in “navigational” searches (looking for a site’s internet address by its name) and especially “commercial” ones (“Best new ski boots this season”). Serve users what they want, deals to hunt for: Apple Maps. Leverage Foursquare and Yelp lessons.
- amelius 4y agoMy main worry: what will happen to my data if Google loses its position and shareholders start pressing for draconian measures?
- fleddr 4y agoThe concern is not whether Google or Microsoft is first, the attention should go to web publishers. If ChatGPT as a search engine works well, it would mean that the user gets a direct answer without ever hitting the website. Which begs the question...why produce any content at all? It will be gobbled up by AI and you'll never hear back. Thanks, I guess. I can think of one issue delaying this inevitability: consumer laziness. Most people type one or two words, usually misspelled. That makes for a pretty poor AI prompt.
- thrill 4y agoProbably, and it's more self induced than due to the quality of the competition.
- gcanyon 4y agoProbably not because of Bing's most recent moves, but inevitably, yes -- depending on your definition of "about to" and your definition of "end". Search in general, and specifically Google search, depends on Adwords for revenue similar to how newspapers used to depend on classified ads. Once ChatGPT.next or something similar removes the opportunity to display ads that people will click on, search will face a similar crisis of revenue to newspapers. Maybe Google will figure out the economics of the new landscape, but it certainly won't hold the same position of prominence in the internet at large as it does now.
- fareesh 4y agoGoogle has figured out how to scale search to the current number of requests per second Scaling a ChatGPT like product to that level would be challenging I assume - and extremely expensive. Is that correct?
- freediver 4y agoGoing rate is about 3 cents per LLM query, so at Google scale of 100k qps, it would be ~$300MM/day. However you probably need to send only about 1/10 of current queries to LLM (as most are still not suitrable for LLM to asnwer) so that would cost only $30MM/day or about $9B/year which is peanuts for Google.
- fareesh 4y agoFrom what I have read, some people are of the view that it will affect their margins and ability to compete in other businesses. This is based on something Satya Nadella mentioned in an interview
- motoxpro 4y agoI said it in another post but AI is a feature, not a product. You just add it on. It doesn't become "the thing." People that are saying this are the same people that said Stories would kill Instagram or Facebook. It's just a feature you add in.
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- trieste92 4y agoLet me guess what this article and thread will have: > BIG TECH AI CHATBOT GOLDRUSH!!!!!! > "Google sucks now, I use Kagi/DDG/Searx instead" > "I have to quote search to get the results I want. Google has seriously gone downhill" Can we cut the shit for two seconds? It was never all that great to begin with. None of them were. Also, these news outlets are just fucking lazy and need to go outside and do actual journalism instead of regurgitating the same trash over and over. ChatGPT is less redundant than they are
- ergonaught 4y ago“Search” relevance seems as secure as they’ll let it be (ie: it’s their own fault if lose that due to self-inflicted distraction). Their challenge in that particular area is the relevance of “search” itself. Most of that decline can be attributed to them indirectly via the behaviors they incentivized (and LLMs will now nail that coffin shut), with the social media siloes playing their part. But they shouldn’t lose an edge here unless they give it away. Never say never.
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- diogenescynic 4y agoEven a duopoly is better than a monopoly.
- jdlyga 4y agoThis is like Amazon getting leapfrogged by an upstart shipping subscription service. The cornerstone of Google is search, and everything else depends on that.
- kweingar 4y agoI am really perplexed by people talking about the end of traditional web search. I guess HN users tend to look up lots of facts and whatnot. But generative AI is not a better UX for queries like "LeBron James instagram" or "wordle" or "Avatar 3 release date" or "WSJ" or "Spanish to English" or "cricket news".
- emodendroket 4y agoI'm not saying that it's not going to settle in to being frequently used for some domains, but I think we're at the "irrational exuberance" point of the curve about what this tech is going to do at the moment. Playing around with it reveals limits pretty quickly.
- ahmetnoid 4y agoI remember Peter Thiel once said that investing in google is investing against innovation, that the company had no competition for a very long time, and that they see no reason to why they needed to reinvent themselves. As long as there's no threat to the company, they can just maintain the current tech and harvest the green from it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q26XIKtwXQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q26XIKtwXQ
- anothernewdude 4y agoIt amazes me how good OpenAI's PR team have been at spinning nothing into people going crazy.
- college_physics 4y agoIt is depressing that people dont recognize that Google has invented and perfected a parasitic business model that has destroyed the internet (and much of tech with it) and this episode feels like just another turn of the downward spiral. The article aims to offer a preliminary analysis of whether Microsoft can become a better parasite: Grabbing the content people generate online, paying nothing, and using it deftly to serve advertisement on the basis of private behavioral traits that are gleaned by prying open and subverting the use of all pieces of IT people use. It is not too difficult by now to imagine alternate tech universes (Philip K Dick style) that have nothing to do with this nightmare, where more or less the same technologies empower individuals and companies and organizations rather than squeezing them dry. The combination of oligopoly status, moral laxity and political dysfunction means we are simply sitting around like sheep discussing whether a new butcher is about to get sharper knives.
- azangru 4y ago> It is depressing that people dont recognize that Google has invented and perfected a parasitic business model ... The article aims to offer a preliminary analysis of whether Microsoft can become a better parasite In this model, are end users who use it to search for information parasites as well? After all, they are consuming content that other people generate online, and usually pay nothing for it. And they love to look for — and find — what they are interested in. If Google didn't satisfy that need well, people wouldn't have preferred it, and it wouldn't have grown.
- fithisux 4y agoGoogle is there to put tolls. This is a parasitic model by definition. Search should be democratized by governments. It is central and should be for everybody. No control.
- azangru 4y ago> Search should be democratized by governments. It is central and should be for everybody. No control. I am confused. Are you suggesting that governments should nationalize the search part of Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, etc.? Or that they should build their own high-quality search engines? And what do we do until they have? > No control. Why do you think governments wouldn't control search engines if they were responsible for providing them? > It is central and should be for everybody How is the current model (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, etc.) not for everybody?
- bilekas 4y agoAs an aside I guess, I have noticed recently how much worse the search actually is. I'm not even referring to the adds, simple things around library documentation for example, where I would always find the best results up top to close to, now I get quite unrelated results, not even containing the phrase/function name I'm searching. This is not because the info is not indexed or is behind a walled garden though, I now have to find the source website and go directly to their docuemtation myself, or their github. It's not an 'issue' but defeats the purpose of google search itself. In a strange change for me particularly, for news/general info I actually will search through sites like reddit or twitter to get some actual targeted results.
- snehk 4y agoI hope so or unless Google changes "back" to when it actually did what I told it to. This might sound weird but one of my skills is that I know (or knew) how to use Google. I would not just type in whatever I needed to find, I would know to exclude specific terms using "-term", put parts of a sentence in quotation marks, add other terms I knew would be on the site where the answer could be found and whatnot. The search is then very specific and if I didn't get a satisfying answer it was because I needed to improve my query. Now whenever I do that, Google takes this query and modifies it without me knowing what they're actually doing. It seems harder and harder to tell Google to just work like it used to.
- ideamotor 4y agoThe problem for Google is that they've already taken a ChatGPT approach of providing inaccurate information. The feature snippets are basically proto-ChatGPT, and as the internet has gained content, most of the top links are also inaccurate. You basically have to append a specific Website to your search to get anything decent.
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- tpoacher 4y agoWhoever commissioned this article has some serious trading strategy in mind for the next couple of weeks ...
- iamgopal 4y agoNo.
- chadlavi 4y agoWait the thing the article proposes might displace google is... _Microsoft Bing_? Absolutely ludicrous.