5 ms·

I'd love to see the statistics on the daily number of Google searches since OpenAI (ChatGPT in particular) came to the fore this year. Anecdotally, I now use C

I'd love to see the statistics on the daily number of Google searches since OpenAI (ChatGPT in particular) came to the fore this year. Anecdotally, I now use ChatGPT for at least 25-50% of the queries that I previously would have had no other channel for other than a search engine. If I was in charge of Alphabet I'd be starting to worry. This move makes them look a bit desperate.

dalbasal 3y ago
The types of queries where gpt is useful (or I hope will soon be useful) to me are those where google themselves have "destroyed the internet.^" If you want to basic information about a physical exercise, a recipe, a travel destination or such... All the content in Google seems to be content farmed. Written by people who don't know, quickly, by copying similar articles. It's just a buggy, manual version of the proverbial gpt anyway. At this point, I may as well just go direct. If I want to know about doing weighted crunches instead of sit ups, Google results already represent all the downsides of using gpt. The got UI is nicer. You can also narrow in on your questions, push back and generally get the same level of content in a better package. Maybe the old chestnut of "computerized recipe book" will finally be solved. ^Ra Ra!
- riku_iki 3y ago
  > All the content in Google seems to be content farmed you are just forgetting to add word "reddit" at the end of your query..
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    That doesn’t help and is just as astroturfed at this point. Companies caught on to this years ago
    - riku_iki 3y ago
      that's very far from my experience, mods and voting community do great job in ranking good posts and comments. Maybe you can give example of your query which you are not satisfied with results?
      - astura 3y ago
        https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-is-being-manipulated-by-big-financial-services-companies/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-i...
        riku_iki 3y ago
        obviously many try to manipulate, the question is in final results, if they can really change picture dramatically.
  - dalbasal 3y ago
    Idk... Maybe... But Reddit seems to hold info pretty poorly. A lot of the subs/posts and incredibly dumb. The good information is there, often, but finding it is hit and miss. Until relatively recently, unofficially archived gives web forums were still available. Reddit search is a downgrade, imo. In any case gpt can do reddit pretty well.
    - riku_iki 3y ago
      > In any case gpt can do reddit pretty well. I am not sure I trust gpt, hallucinations are still very common.
DilutedMetrics 3y ago
Also growth in Bing searches with Bing Chat (backed by ChatGPT). I even switched my mobile browser from Brave to Edge to use the integration.
mrkramer 3y ago
Casual users don't care about ChatGPT or any other smart chat app because they are used to Google Search or classical search bar type web search for decades now. If chat apps take over, I think they will first taker over desktop computers because on mobile it is easier to type a few keywords in the web search bar and get 5 or 6 relevant web results than it is to chat with a chat bot for like 5 minutes. Informational quires are most likely to be more useful in chat apps than in the classical web search but navigational and transactional quires are here to stay on Google or whatever search engine comes about.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  I was going to say that mobile can just chat on the mic to the gbt but then I remembered speech to text is an apparently hard problem that no one has made progress on in 15 years
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Actually, OpenAI just made the progress you're asking for. Try the voice conversation mode in ChatGPT app (if you can, it's still a beta testing version IIRC). This one is to the likes of Google Assistant as GPT-4 is to GPT-2. Huge quality jump - not only it doesn't suck (like e.g. Google Assistant does), it works, and absurdly well at that. ~1% error rate for me in English, which isn't even my first language, on the go, in rain, next to noisy street...
methyl 3y ago
There is no difference whatsoever, you can look up some Similarweb stats on this.
ilaksh 3y ago
Google reportedly has $118 billion cash on hand. I think they would have happily invested more than $2 billion in an OpenAI competitor if they thought more money than that would matter.
TacticalCoder 3y ago
I don't see how that could even register. We use OpenAI at home (both me and my wife) but everything ChatGPT spouts must, invariably, be verified. It's not even "trust but verify" but "Oh yup, I didn't thought of that. However it may be a lie because ChatGPT is a pathological liar, and as I cannot possibly trust a lying tool, I'll now verify" (I know, I know, there's a discussion regarding nomenclature: "lying" / "hallucinating" or whatever. But anyone who's actually using ChatGPT knows what I mean). Basically the output of ChatGPT, for me, goes directly into Google / Wikipedia / etc. The one case where I can use the output of ChatGPT directly is when I translate from, say, english to french or vice-versa and I know both languages well enough to be able to tell if the translation is okay or not. Those believing they can use the output of ChatGPT without verifying it are basically these lawyers who referenced hallucinated cases to a judge. As another person as commented: it didn't even make a dent in Google's search requests and that is no surprise.
- oezi 3y ago
  If you want more factual answers why not use Bing with ChatGPT?
- constantly 3y ago
  I don’t use chatgpt or LLMs for anything factual at all given the workflow you’ve described of asking a question and then needing to separately search all results. But they are very useful for framing documents, summarizing things, etc.
- pradn 3y ago
  ChatGPT remixes info from beyond the first page of Google search. That’s the value. If you ask it for a list of nice nature spaces in Tokyo, like I just did, it returns 12 spots that all seem appealing. Already, that’s more information density than a Google Search. But now I have to go look up if these actually exist (this isn’t the sort of mistake it usually makes though), where it is, the hours, admission prices etc. So that’s going to be a few Google searches for this question. Of course, I’ll have to actually go to the sites for these gardens, if they exist, because you can’t quite trust Google Maps’s accuracy either - hours and opening days can be off, especially around the holidays, when I’d like to go to Tokyo. One ChatGPT query -> several Google searches. If for this text output, ChatGPT also linked me directly to the gardens’ sites, scraped the info from the live site, and summarized this - that would actually save a ton of time. Google could have a leg up bc it has a knowledge graph, but so does Microsoft. This requires a lot more than training an LLM - this requires it to be an actual product, not a tech demo like it is. A chat with an agent that occasionally lies is a terrible UI. I think there’s great scope for UI innovation here. But such an experience might be pretty expensive in terms of compute - lots of LLM queries and extra lookup systems. Someone who does this hard integration work and is willing to spend a lot of resources per query will deliver a delightful, time-saving user experience, and can probably charge for it. And that may be a great value-prop for local AI - you can give it tons of resources to solve your particular problem. As I see it, mass market LLMs that are provided for free will never do this extra work for you. ChatGPT might be in a good position bc it already has a ton of paying customers that it can continue to draw a wall around. Their early Nov announcement might be something along these lines.
sadtoot 3y ago
the supermajority of humanity doesn't know what chatGPT is useful for, so google's total amount of searches are almost certainly the same. you could only detect the difference for, say, searches that would return stackoverflow results
- kaoD 3y ago
  ...which I suspect has a large overlap with ad blocker users and, even those that don't, probably are not as sensitive to online ads as average Joe.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
snickmy 3y ago
I'm struggling in finding the source, but I read some in depth analysis that reports that bing only got 0.53% market share since the launch of chatGPT integration. Apparently they are cannibalising small players but not google.

dalbasal 3y ago

The types of queries where gpt is useful (or I hope will soon be useful) to me are those where google themselves have "destroyed the internet.^" If you want to basic information about a physical exercise, a recipe, a travel destination or such... All the content in Google seems to be content farmed. Written by people who don't know, quickly, by copying similar articles. It's just a buggy, manual version of the proverbial gpt anyway. At this point, I may as well just go direct. If I want to know about doing weighted crunches instead of sit ups, Google results already represent all the downsides of using gpt. The got UI is nicer. You can also narrow in on your questions, push back and generally get the same level of content in a better package. Maybe the old chestnut of "computerized recipe book" will finally be solved. ^Ra Ra!

riku_iki 3y ago
> All the content in Google seems to be content farmed you are just forgetting to add word "reddit" at the end of your query..
- edgyquant 3y ago
  That doesn’t help and is just as astroturfed at this point. Companies caught on to this years ago
  - riku_iki 3y ago
    that's very far from my experience, mods and voting community do great job in ranking good posts and comments. Maybe you can give example of your query which you are not satisfied with results?
    - astura 3y ago
      https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-is-being-manipulated-by-big-financial-services-companies/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-i...
      - riku_iki 3y ago
        obviously many try to manipulate, the question is in final results, if they can really change picture dramatically.
- dalbasal 3y ago
  Idk... Maybe... But Reddit seems to hold info pretty poorly. A lot of the subs/posts and incredibly dumb. The good information is there, often, but finding it is hit and miss. Until relatively recently, unofficially archived gives web forums were still available. Reddit search is a downgrade, imo. In any case gpt can do reddit pretty well.
  - riku_iki 3y ago
    > In any case gpt can do reddit pretty well. I am not sure I trust gpt, hallucinations are still very common.

DilutedMetrics 3y ago

Also growth in Bing searches with Bing Chat (backed by ChatGPT). I even switched my mobile browser from Brave to Edge to use the integration.

mrkramer 3y ago

Casual users don't care about ChatGPT or any other smart chat app because they are used to Google Search or classical search bar type web search for decades now. If chat apps take over, I think they will first taker over desktop computers because on mobile it is easier to type a few keywords in the web search bar and get 5 or 6 relevant web results than it is to chat with a chat bot for like 5 minutes. Informational quires are most likely to be more useful in chat apps than in the classical web search but navigational and transactional quires are here to stay on Google or whatever search engine comes about.

kjkjadksj 3y ago
I was going to say that mobile can just chat on the mic to the gbt but then I remembered speech to text is an apparently hard problem that no one has made progress on in 15 years
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Actually, OpenAI just made the progress you're asking for. Try the voice conversation mode in ChatGPT app (if you can, it's still a beta testing version IIRC). This one is to the likes of Google Assistant as GPT-4 is to GPT-2. Huge quality jump - not only it doesn't suck (like e.g. Google Assistant does), it works, and absurdly well at that. ~1% error rate for me in English, which isn't even my first language, on the go, in rain, next to noisy street...

methyl 3y ago

There is no difference whatsoever, you can look up some Similarweb stats on this.

ilaksh 3y ago

Google reportedly has $118 billion cash on hand. I think they would have happily invested more than $2 billion in an OpenAI competitor if they thought more money than that would matter.

TacticalCoder 3y ago

I don't see how that could even register. We use OpenAI at home (both me and my wife) but everything ChatGPT spouts must, invariably, be verified. It's not even "trust but verify" but "Oh yup, I didn't thought of that. However it may be a lie because ChatGPT is a pathological liar, and as I cannot possibly trust a lying tool, I'll now verify" (I know, I know, there's a discussion regarding nomenclature: "lying" / "hallucinating" or whatever. But anyone who's actually using ChatGPT knows what I mean). Basically the output of ChatGPT, for me, goes directly into Google / Wikipedia / etc. The one case where I can use the output of ChatGPT directly is when I translate from, say, english to french or vice-versa and I know both languages well enough to be able to tell if the translation is okay or not. Those believing they can use the output of ChatGPT without verifying it are basically these lawyers who referenced hallucinated cases to a judge. As another person as commented: it didn't even make a dent in Google's search requests and that is no surprise.

oezi 3y ago
If you want more factual answers why not use Bing with ChatGPT?
constantly 3y ago
I don’t use chatgpt or LLMs for anything factual at all given the workflow you’ve described of asking a question and then needing to separately search all results. But they are very useful for framing documents, summarizing things, etc.
pradn 3y ago
ChatGPT remixes info from beyond the first page of Google search. That’s the value. If you ask it for a list of nice nature spaces in Tokyo, like I just did, it returns 12 spots that all seem appealing. Already, that’s more information density than a Google Search. But now I have to go look up if these actually exist (this isn’t the sort of mistake it usually makes though), where it is, the hours, admission prices etc. So that’s going to be a few Google searches for this question. Of course, I’ll have to actually go to the sites for these gardens, if they exist, because you can’t quite trust Google Maps’s accuracy either - hours and opening days can be off, especially around the holidays, when I’d like to go to Tokyo. One ChatGPT query -> several Google searches. If for this text output, ChatGPT also linked me directly to the gardens’ sites, scraped the info from the live site, and summarized this - that would actually save a ton of time. Google could have a leg up bc it has a knowledge graph, but so does Microsoft. This requires a lot more than training an LLM - this requires it to be an actual product, not a tech demo like it is. A chat with an agent that occasionally lies is a terrible UI. I think there’s great scope for UI innovation here. But such an experience might be pretty expensive in terms of compute - lots of LLM queries and extra lookup systems. Someone who does this hard integration work and is willing to spend a lot of resources per query will deliver a delightful, time-saving user experience, and can probably charge for it. And that may be a great value-prop for local AI - you can give it tons of resources to solve your particular problem. As I see it, mass market LLMs that are provided for free will never do this extra work for you. ChatGPT might be in a good position bc it already has a ton of paying customers that it can continue to draw a wall around. Their early Nov announcement might be something along these lines.

sadtoot 3y ago

the supermajority of humanity doesn't know what chatGPT is useful for, so google's total amount of searches are almost certainly the same. you could only detect the difference for, say, searches that would return stackoverflow results

kaoD 3y ago
...which I suspect has a large overlap with ad blocker users and, even those that don't, probably are not as sensitive to online ads as average Joe.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

snickmy 3y ago

I'm struggling in finding the source, but I read some in depth analysis that reports that bing only got 0.53% market share since the launch of chatGPT integration. Apparently they are cannibalising small players but not google.