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Comment by jrflo

8 hours 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.

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jrflo

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baron816  8 hours 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.

  • darkoob12  7 hours ago

    I actually use Claude for finding stuff and recommendations. like "Find me a decent shoe with blah blah conditions" this query now goes to LLM Chat instead of google search. I use google search to find the url of something that i know exists like find the website of a company or finding address of a store.

    • bitpush  7 hours ago

      The issue is Claude is losing money serving you that, and while Google makes money serving you the same result. On top of that, you are paying Claude to get that same result.

      Unless Claude adds ads, it isnt going to be sustainable for both Anthropic or you - and congrats, you've invented Google Search.

      2 replies →

    • thefourthchime  5 hours ago

      Same I use models for nearly everything. Google only better at:

      - fast, even the shitty AI results are nearly instant.

      - some results like actors in a movie, or where to stream are useful

      - instead of typing a url

      But that’s it. I never use Google outside of that. It’s just ads, and most of the web is just ads or AI slop.

      1 reply →

  • claude-ai  7 hours ago

    "google it" has a stain on it. And that's not said in jest. In my social circle, it has grown a boomer-tint. Like it or not; it's just how it is.

    I personally like google over asking an AI. Esp. since something like google is a substrate without which an AI would be far more prone to hallucinations.

brokencode  8 hours 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  7 hours 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  7 hours 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.

panarky  6 hours ago

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

paperwallet  8 hours 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.

root_axis  7 hours 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.