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Their entire business is predicated on search dominance, which is now on much shakier footing. Agreed that those comments were ridiculous pre-ChatGPT, but now t

by jrflo 2mo ago

Their entire business is predicated on search dominance, which is now on much shakier footing. Agreed that those comments were ridiculous pre-ChatGPT, but now they have a genuine challenger.

paperwallet 2mo ago
I disagree A model serves a different purpose from a web crawler. I'd prefer to be able to find source material over steering a model I have no control over while managing hallucinated outputs without the ability to fact check. Just because it sourced some materials using RAG doesn't make its outputs valid, accurate, or factual.
brokencode 2mo ago
That’s over half of their business, but they do have some diversification with YouTube, Play Store, and cloud services. Some of their newer efforts like Waymo and AI hosting for Apple could turn into large businesses to make up for any lost search revenue. They also have significant costs to maintain their search revenue, such as $20B a year to Apple alone to make Google the default search engine in Safari. If search becomes less lucrative, they would presumably pay less for such deals. So yeah, definitely a time of disruption for Google and they need to keep moving fast on many fronts, but they are still well positioned in multiple markets to be successful.
- phatskat 2mo ago
  > AI hosting for Apple Curious to see how long that lasts - YouTube and Google Maps were fairly mainstay apps for iPhones for a while, and eventually Apple cut the Maps cord to do their own thing. I don’t know if that’s from an existential concern of “we need to eventually move Maps in-house”, but given the Google of it all I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple is already at least planning on how to do the same with AI once the bulk of the usage evens out i.e. let someone else worry about it now while also getting a read on what rolling their own would feasibly require.
  - brokencode 2mo ago
    That’s tough to say. So far, Apple has been very reluctant to invest in the massive infrastructure you need to run large AI models. But if they are successful in making on-device models that work well, then you don’t really need as much cloud infrastructure.
baron816 2mo ago
This take only makes sense if you don’t know what people use Google search for. If you’re looking for your local Ford dealership, or to book a Carnival cruise, or need a disability lawyer, or to refinance your credit card debt, you’re searching for an ad. You’re not using Chat-GPT for that. You’re asking Chat-GPT about a research project. It’s stealing away all the hard to monetize searches and leaving the incredibly lucrative searches. Your narrative depressed Google’s stock price for years, and bears finally gave up since they kept coming out with huge earnings beats.
- quietbritishjim 2mo ago
  People 100% are asking ChatGPT for all those things.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - toomuchtodo 2mo ago
    Someone deleted a reply to this comment “And where does ChatGPT get the data for those answers?” they wrote and I think the question is important: LLM chatbots can crawl the web just as well as Google.
    - suncemoje 2mo ago
      Huh? But only if you give it a tool it can use - which brings you back to Google (or Bing)
      - toomuchtodo 2mo ago
        Anyone can leverage common crawl and/or run their own crawler, to do so isn’t novel. https://commoncrawl.org/ https://commoncrawl.org/
        suncemoje 2mo ago
ai-x 2mo ago
Search is now only 50% of the revenue. But sure keep the myth going.
- suncemoje 2mo ago
  Cloud business is making big dollar I suppose
root_axis 2mo ago
> which is now on much shakier footing Is it though? As far as I can tell they continue to maintain total domination of web search, and LLMs do not replace search engines, they work on top of them.
bborud 2mo ago
And yet, their search engine is enshittified beyond all belief.
panarky 2mo ago
If by "shakier footing" you mean accelerating growth in query volume, ad impressions, revenue and earnings, I'll take it.
lazide 2mo ago
used to be. Cloud, Waymo, and some other bets have been paying off.

by jrflo 2mo ago

Their entire business is predicated on search dominance, which is now on much shakier footing. Agreed that those comments were ridiculous pre-ChatGPT, but now they have a genuine challenger.

paperwallet 2mo ago

I disagree A model serves a different purpose from a web crawler. I'd prefer to be able to find source material over steering a model I have no control over while managing hallucinated outputs without the ability to fact check. Just because it sourced some materials using RAG doesn't make its outputs valid, accurate, or factual.

brokencode 2mo ago

That’s over half of their business, but they do have some diversification with YouTube, Play Store, and cloud services. Some of their newer efforts like Waymo and AI hosting for Apple could turn into large businesses to make up for any lost search revenue. They also have significant costs to maintain their search revenue, such as $20B a year to Apple alone to make Google the default search engine in Safari. If search becomes less lucrative, they would presumably pay less for such deals. So yeah, definitely a time of disruption for Google and they need to keep moving fast on many fronts, but they are still well positioned in multiple markets to be successful.

phatskat 2mo ago
> AI hosting for Apple Curious to see how long that lasts - YouTube and Google Maps were fairly mainstay apps for iPhones for a while, and eventually Apple cut the Maps cord to do their own thing. I don’t know if that’s from an existential concern of “we need to eventually move Maps in-house”, but given the Google of it all I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple is already at least planning on how to do the same with AI once the bulk of the usage evens out i.e. let someone else worry about it now while also getting a read on what rolling their own would feasibly require.
- brokencode 2mo ago
  That’s tough to say. So far, Apple has been very reluctant to invest in the massive infrastructure you need to run large AI models. But if they are successful in making on-device models that work well, then you don’t really need as much cloud infrastructure.

baron816 2mo ago

This take only makes sense if you don’t know what people use Google search for. If you’re looking for your local Ford dealership, or to book a Carnival cruise, or need a disability lawyer, or to refinance your credit card debt, you’re searching for an ad. You’re not using Chat-GPT for that. You’re asking Chat-GPT about a research project. It’s stealing away all the hard to monetize searches and leaving the incredibly lucrative searches. Your narrative depressed Google’s stock price for years, and bears finally gave up since they kept coming out with huge earnings beats.

quietbritishjim 2mo ago
People 100% are asking ChatGPT for all those things.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- toomuchtodo 2mo ago
  Someone deleted a reply to this comment “And where does ChatGPT get the data for those answers?” they wrote and I think the question is important: LLM chatbots can crawl the web just as well as Google.
  - suncemoje 2mo ago
    Huh? But only if you give it a tool it can use - which brings you back to Google (or Bing)
    - toomuchtodo 2mo ago
      Anyone can leverage common crawl and/or run their own crawler, to do so isn’t novel. https://commoncrawl.org/ https://commoncrawl.org/
      - suncemoje 2mo ago

ai-x 2mo ago

Search is now only 50% of the revenue. But sure keep the myth going.

suncemoje 2mo ago
Cloud business is making big dollar I suppose

root_axis 2mo ago

> which is now on much shakier footing Is it though? As far as I can tell they continue to maintain total domination of web search, and LLMs do not replace search engines, they work on top of them.

bborud 2mo ago

And yet, their search engine is enshittified beyond all belief.

panarky 2mo ago

If by "shakier footing" you mean accelerating growth in query volume, ad impressions, revenue and earnings, I'll take it.

lazide 2mo ago

used to be. Cloud, Waymo, and some other bets have been paying off.