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Google's damned if they do and damned if the don't here: - If they don't make search AI centric, they're going to get lapped by AI-first competitors like Perpl
by spankalee 1y ago
Google's damned if they do and damned if the don't here:
- If they don't make search AI centric, they're going to get lapped by AI-first competitors like Perplexity, OpenAI, etc. We saw many people here predict Google's pending demise from this.
- If they do make search centric, they're unfairly consuming they world's content and hoarding the user traffic to themselves.
Since no reasonable company is just going to stand by and willing let itself be obsoleted, Google's obviously going to go for option 2. But had they for some reason stood down, then they would have been supplanted by an AI competitor and the headline would read "News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Perplexity" - just a few years later.
- vgeek 1y agoWe are getting to watch The Innovator's Dilemma play out, yet again. The downward trajectory of Google's utility has only been worsening over the past 10 years-- but only in the last 3-4 have mainstream audiences started to notice.
- bitpush 1y agoThe first part of that statement is valid but the second one isn't. If anything, most of big tech has shown exceptional humility against new threats Instagram incorporating stories (Snapchat) YouTube incorporating Shorts (tiktok) Google search incorporating AI Mode (perplexity et al) This is in stark contrast to Kodak and the likes who scoffed at digital camera and phone cameras as distraction. They were sure that their ways were superior, ultimately leading to their demise.
- vgeek 1y agoMaybe you misunderstood the scope that Google is a search advertising company first and foremost? Alphabet ignores (yes, they essentially invented transformers, etc.., but actual productive efforts likely correlate to predicted TAM or protecting status quo, answering to shareholders while waiting to acquire threats) a market that will eventually usurp their cash cow of first party search ads, because the new market isn't initially as lucrative due to market size. There is also the consideration of cannibalizing their high margin search ads market with an error prone and resource intensive tech that cannot immediately be monetized in a second price auction (both from inventory and bidder participant perspectives). A $10 billion market for Google would be under 3% of revenue, but if the market grows 10x, it is much more attractive, but now the incumbent may be trailing the nascent companies who refined their offerings (without risk of cannibalizing their own offerings) while said market was growing. We are currently at the stage where Google is incorporating Gemini responses and alienating publishers (by not sending monetizable clicks while using their content) while still focusing on monetization via their traditional ad products elsewhere on the SERPs (text search ads, shopping ads). Keep in mind, they also control 3rd party display ads via DoubleClick and Adsense-- but inventory on 3rd party sites will drop and Google will lose their 30%+ cut if users don't leave the SERPs. Dozens of major news publications have covered the decline of Google's organic search quality decline and emphasis on monetization (ignoring incorrect infoboxes and AI generated answers). See articles such as https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/google-search-size-usefulness-decline/675409/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/googl... and a collection even posted here on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30348460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30348460 . This has played into reasons why people have shifted away from Google. Their results are focused solely on maximizing Google's earnings per mille, as leaked (https://www.wsj.com/tech/u-s-urges-breakup-of-google-ad-businesses-65b07c7b https://www.wsj.com/tech/u-s-urges-breakup-of-google-ad-busi...) where the ads team has guanxi over search quality. Once Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts left their roles, the focus on monetization over useful SERPs becomes much more evident.
- tehjoker 1y agoA simple tale of how capitalism leads to unintended anti-social consequences through market mechanisms that no one participant can control.
- msgodel 1y agoFor anything important I always ask LLMs for links and follow them. I think this will probably just create a strong incentive to cover important things and move away from clickbait. It's probably a win for everyone in the long run although it means news sites will have to change. That's going to be painful for them but it's not like they're angels either.
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago> I think this will probably just create a strong incentive to cover important things and move away from clickbait. But clickbait is how they make money... That's like saying, "Oh, Apple will just have to move away from selling the iPhone and start selling hamburgers instead." I mean, sure, but they're not going to like it, and it's going to come with a lot of lost revenue and profits. I find myself regularly copying URLs, sending it to Gemini, and asking it to answer what I want to get out of the article. I'm not wasting my time scrolling through a mile of website and 88,000 ads to find the answer to the headline.
- chgs 1y agoThose adverts and clickbait will infect llms soon enough, just be far harder to block.
- nitwit005 1y agoYes, unfortunately for those saying AIs will only get better, advertising is a major reason we should expect them to get worse.
- techjamie 1y agoIronically, I wonder if it would inspire a slew of downstream services that use LLMs to clean advertising out of the mainstream LLM responses.
- downsplat 1y agoWith the huge usage that LLM APIs are getting in all sorts of industries, they cannot be going away, and they're cheap. If consumer AI chatbots get enshittified, you can just grab some open source bring-your-api-keys front-end, and chat away for peanuts without ads or anything anti-user. I use https://github.com/sigoden/aichat https://github.com/sigoden/aichat , but there are GUIs too. Plus, anyone enterprising can just write a web front-end and sell it as "the ad-free AI chatbot, only $10/mo, usage limits apply".
- stefan_ 1y agoSpare us the "woe is me" for they literally invented replacing the publishers. Yesterday its infoboxes, today its shitty AI summaries. Which is still the case, so good riddance.
- bitpush 1y agoWhat is infobox?
- juujian 1y agoThe one way forward for them would have been to maintain their quality, but they decided to cash in on their monopoly instead. Peak short-termis.
- ajross 1y agoSeems to my untrained eyes like Google's AI search is actually the best on the market, no? Seems like a lot of HN users have trained themselves not to type queries into the search prompt anymore and then complain about the quality of a product they don't use.
- hobs 1y ago[flagged]
- halfmatthalfcat 1y agoI take it you’re the rebellious teenager then?
- hobs 1y agoAgainst the biggest corporations? Sure, I'd much rather fulfill the role of overly critical teenager then defensive protective parent when it comes to rapacious companies who deserve none of our support.
- marcus_holmes 1y agoPossibly their AI search - I don't know, I switched to Kagi to get a search engine that actually did what I asked instead of just trying to put as many ads in front of me as it could.
- chneu 1y agoI tried to like Kagi but the UI is awful and the results were often way off from what was relevant. Then the limitations were pretty lame.
- marcuschong 1y agoIt's funny most people are saying Google will win the AI wars, though that is precisely what will cannibalize their current business model, which had a much bigger moat than frontier LLMs, apparently.
- w-ll 1y agoYou think we wont start seeing ads or paid for refs/links in those AI responses? Not defending Google here, when they turned that feature on I posted to some friends "another nail in the coffin for the web as we know it" or something to that effect.
- lostmsu 1y agoEventually open models will be able to do the same, so why would anyone use ad-ridden service? The first LLM provider who turns on ads on their responses will disappear in a brink.
- olyjohn 1y agoPeople use, and pay for, ad-ridden services all the time. I mean, just look at Cable TV and the direction all the streaming services are going.
- lostmsu 1y agoProvided there are no identical alternatives without ads.
- bitpush 1y agoData won't be open and free for scraping in the future. And news worthy sites will ask for $$. So nope, open models won't be a threat in the future.
- _flux 1y agoIt will take a long time until an average person has the resources to run models of similar quality (and speed) as Google and OpenAI can provide today.
- bgwalter 1y agoThey could simply restore the search quality they had in 2010. No one wants these "AI" summaries except for people looking to get promoted for "having an impact" inside Google. What Google is doing right now is sabotage the search moat they do have. They are throwing it all away because of some "AI" rainmakers inside the company.
- ketzo 1y agoThen what explains people doing millions of web searches on perplexity/chatgpt/claude?
- kccqzy 1y agoThat's impossible unless the web reverted back to 2010, when walled gardens weren't prevalent, making your own blog was common, doable and often done by those without programming experience, forums were alive and well, and people wanted to share things on the web rather than group chats.
- voxl 1y agoThere are plenty of blogs, plenty of obvious low quality spam to block, plenty of features to enable allowlist and blocklists. To think for a second that the Google search experience couldn't be made significantly better at the snap of a finger by Google is to live in a fantasy world.
- 1y ago
- stormfather 1y agoIs this really that bad for Google? Do Perplexity and OpenAI use paid SERP API under the hood? Google doesn't have to make money from ads on search, if its paid search.
- skeaker 1y agoI never really bought the idea of any AI company killing Google. They have too much momentum to really be seriously impacted, too many people who only use them exclusively and will continue to do so their whole lives on the name brand alone. They might risk a lack of "growth" but that only really matters to shareholders, not to end users.
- hadlock 1y agoYahoo had 90%+ of the search market and they lost it in a few years to google because they were unable to innovate. I don't think anyone saw that coming. Everyone was building "portals" (remember those? AOL.com? I think verizon.com was one at some point with news and weather) to try and compete with Yahoo's dominance in search. It can happen again. LLM Chat is certainly an existential threat to the googs. Part of the OpenAI lore is that google originally viewed it as a threat to their search/advertising revenue model and defunded it on that basis. The fact that people are willing to pay for LLM and use it over search seems to indicate that Google's free product isn't as good, and llm chat is better "Enough" that people are willing to pay for it.
- skeaker 1y agoThe major flaw in your argument is that Yahoo is still around. They still have tons of traffic, some of the most in the world, just behind Reddit. They are not constantly growing, yes, but that is exactly my point. They have a satisfied userbase who will use them for life as does Google. Neither is going anywhere any time soon. Both make billions of dollars annually.