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Comment by azan_

3 days ago

It’s not anymore (actually google is awful now) and people are still using it

As Chrome has about 75% market share across all platforms - probably 90% of those use the google default.

As far as I'm aware OpenAI doesn't control any defaults for which AIChat service to use.

  • It took Google a decade before they released Chrome so OpenAI has plenty of time to have a Chrome moment. Maybe it'll be something that comes from the OpenClaw acqui-hires?

    • During that time - as was pointed out elsewhere - Google search was simply way better than the alternatives - embarrassingly so. It also paid the Mozilla foundation lots of money to be the default.

    • Google wasn't bleeding money like crazy at the time. Google was operating in a post-hype cycle. We are most likely somewhere in an epsilon around the peak of the AI hype and OpenAI is more comparable to AOL or Yahoo. One striking similarity is the inability to innovate themselves, instead relying on copying others or acquiring.

      The OpenClaw guy is surely a decent product person, but OpenClaw did not innovate in any real sense. He was just pushing an existing idea to the limit without any concern for quality or security. It had its hype moment, it inspired a bunch of people, and might find its own niche, but it is a flavor of the week kind of thing. I've been getting a lot more cold-calls by non-technical people in the last few weeks thanks to it. Congratulations, the quality threshold that justifies my response rose in equal measure. Nothing was gained, just a lot of tokens spent.

    • Um. Google has already integrated Gemini into Chrome. I'm not sure what you mean by "OpenAI has plenty of time to have a Chrome moment". If you're just referring to the browser wars, the original wars were fought (furiously) between Microsoft, Mozilla, (and to a lesser extent Apple). Microsoft thought they had won, and then Chrome came out.

Yeah but the only alternative that's actually better is paid. Google is still best ad supported search engine out there. There's no one obvious to turn to or recommend.

The best free alternative to Google right is ironically $preferred_llm_provider and ChatGPT is the obvious uncapped free option. I think free will end up being OpenAI's most if they manage to make it profitable.

> It’s not anymore (actually google is awful now) and people are still using it

if people are still using it, then it's really one of the few things, right?

* you are wrong and it's not awful

* it _is_ awful but good enough for normal people to never care about alternatives, which are anyway not even very easy to find given the absolute stranglehold google has on that slice

either way not quite the same as choice of llms today.

I've been feeling the pain of google being awful for a while now. Do you have a different search engine you would recommend?

  • I am using duckduckgo for a decade. But especially, I am using Firefox Saved searches a lot. I type mdn in the bar, and it searches in the Mozilla developer network. osm is openstreetmap, so is stackoverflow, w is Wikipedia, yt is YouTube... I often know on which website I will find the info anyway, so I use less a generic search

  • I used Kagi for several months, I guess I'd at least recommend trying it out.

    I stopped using it, though, and I can't honestly say I've missed it. It was nice not having sponsored results, I guess, but overall it didn't feel like a transformative experience.