Comment by mmmBacon
20 hours ago
I think Google’s search and ad business are at risk. Search has become such a mess that it’s become harder and harder to use to find quality results. It reminds me of Yahoo before Google in a way.
I’m using ChatCPT or equivalent for 60% of my searches. The remaining 40% is just muscle memory. Of that 40% about half the time I regret using Google search due to the difficulty of finding the relevant result.
I can see search users moving to ChatGPT or such and Googles Ad business suffering as a result and a general downward spiral of Google search.
This is a temporary situation. Think of it like how Napster let you download any song for free for a few years. For a while, all you heard was how the Internet was going to put all musicians out of business. Obviously that didn't happen.
The same will happen here. It's not like OpenAI has built a search engine; every time they need a live search they hit Bing (please correct me if I'm wrong) and get the results from there. No matter how you slice it, search companies who actually supply the data are going to get reimbursed, and since most users don't pay $20 / month, that likely means ads everywhere.
Also, Google's AI overviews are getting very good. Initially it was pretty inaccurate, but now it's basically 95% as good as ChatGPT, and faster. Most normies I talk to think it's good enough.
You don't think putting ads in Gemini output has crossed Google's mind?
I've never understood the "AI is eating search! Google is dead!" theory. The specific mechanism (whether that be keyword search, LLM conversation or something else) by which users describe their needs to a company doesn't matter, all that matters is that (a) the company makes that mechanism available for free, (b) it does a good job of satisfying the user's need and (c) ads can be smuggled into it.
Why do you assume I don’t think that? Of course it will happen at some stage. But my comment wasn’t addressing the future, but now. Effectively ChatGPT is buying market share by not having ads; that’s clear. What’s not clear is whether there’s a more innovative model than inserting low-quality, mostly irrelevant ads into the body of the chat they way Google and YouTube do it today. In a Chat agent, advertising also will be an issue for credibility of results. So I think the ad model as we know it will need to change.
> You don't think putting ads in Gemini output has crossed Google's mind?
What do you think the mandatory youtube link in every conversation is, if not a link to an ad?
They have successfully monetised chatbot AI, while no one else has.