by ax0ar on 3/25/23, 12:20 PM with 118 comments
Add to that Alphabet’s notorious love for constantly killing products, and I’m wondering how long they will be able to keep this going?
With ChatGPT and other AI tools being introduced, will the need and reliance on classic search engines drop quickly or will it take years?
Where do you see this going?
by PaulHoule on 3/25/23, 12:33 PM
When Google first introduced ads they were in those distinctive little boxes and not blended with the content. They said at the time that blending the ads with the content would destroy the legitimacy of the product and that they didn’t want to be evil.
Trouble is the ads compete with the search results. Why would a user even look at the ads if the search results were good? Why would an advertiser buy ads if they could spend resources in SEO and get an organic search spot that isn’t labeled as a self-serving ad?
SEO is a Janus-faced God. It has a negative aspect of spam and dark patterns (remember those weird pages you would hit on a typo domain? They looked like they were drawn with a crayon but were well-oiled monetization machines.). On the other hand, quality content that people want to link to and that fills gaps that people are searching for is powerful too. (Particularly when joined with darker tactics.)
You might blame Microsoft’s purchase of Powerset to get the knowledge graph technology behind Bing, Google’s panic and subsequent purchase of Freebase. But certainly it was the blending of ad content with the search results that made the organic search results wither away.
by tyingq on 3/25/23, 12:46 PM
As bad as Google search has gotten, for normal users, it's been much better than than the next best thing for a long time. This made Google complacent.
In the past, I thought that Google's main source of revenue, ads in search results, would be at risk because people were searching on places other than Google.com. Like using Siri on their iPhones, or asking their Alexa device something they might have used to use Google for, or searching Amazon.com for product oriented searches rather than Google.
But, Siri, Alexa, Amazon, etc, still fail at things that Google's search can do well. So what I expected to happen didn't pan out.
I do think that all the hoopla around ChatGPT/GPT-4/etc is a little exaggerated. But it does show that entities other than Google can, just recently, leapfrog them for some tasks. Like around taking a request, figuring out intent, and giving a reasonably good targeted answer.
So, perhaps where this is going is that the maturity of that kind of tech finally allows for competitors to take marketshare from Google. Since the starting point isn't Google having a huge lead.
by idiomaticrust on 3/25/23, 12:32 PM
They are too large to be innovative. Internally they are paralyzed by processes, management, and burned-out programmers who had ideals a few years ago and now are tired of the internal system.
But Google is a rich company that can buy innovative startups and acquires innovative technology whenever they want.
I think it will be key for their survival.
by speedgoose on 3/25/23, 12:55 PM
YouTube is the biggest on the long videos segment and has no real competitor.
Google Maps is a great product too without big competition for end users.
Android is the main (and only?) alternative to iOS.
Then they have many descent products like Google Photos or Google Sheets. A lot of strong competition on this domain but again not being the biggest isn’t the end of the world.
Google Search will probably still keep plenty of users. Brand loyalty is strong. For example, a thousand of Norwegians bought the worst electric car of the market this year because it’s a Toyota. I’m sure such people will also happily keep using Google Search even when it’s only showing them garbage content full of ads.
by sp332 on 3/25/23, 12:32 PM
Oh, you meant the search engine. Yeah, maybe.
by bm3719 on 3/25/23, 1:07 PM
Also keep in mind that ChatGPT in its current form hasn't been fully productized. Just like Google search was excellent when what it provided was in line with user needs and now only provides the absolute minimum value to get as much ad money as it can, so too are LLMs in that phase. There's nothing stopping LLM-driven services from returning the same kind of results based on whatever topic is being queried about. In fact, that's exactly what companies like MS want to do with it. None of the large companies pouring billions into this space have a goal of making society at large better informed. They want LLMs integrated into their services so they can deliver a new level of targeting for ads, reduce customer support costs, shape narratives, automate PR, and attract users to platforms that can then be marketed to their real customers (other businesses and governments mainly). Those of us envisioning idyllic futures that this tech will unlock need only look at every other technical advancement in recent history to see how it will end up.
by devchix on 3/25/23, 5:39 PM
And now, there's Bing with ChatGPT integration, and I mostly use Bing now. Results are still SEO'd to hell, so there's that. Remember the innocent old days when I (we) conscientiously clicked on some ad with deliberation, because the search results were good and we wanted to little guys to make some fraction of pennies that Google paid them? At one time there were a rash of search engine contenders, before Google there was AltaVista; a Google offshoot with an unpronounceable name, Cuil, Cuoil, was a thing, so was Yahoo! Search.
Google Search is not so much dying, as "Search" is being destroyed through ad monetization. I know (or believe) there are still pockets of the internet with useful information, but when I go to Google it seems that there's nothing except things to buy, it's a giant mall where everybody is but nobody wants to be.
by alex-moon on 3/25/23, 12:39 PM
by s1k3s on 3/25/23, 1:06 PM
Google claims your website and content should be user-focused, and not SEO focused. But then when you make a page that's user-focused, you get ranked bellow 10 other crap pages who don't actually offer much of the info you were looking for, but they show up ahead because their owners gamed the ranking algorithm. This is in my opinion the most important thing they need to fix right now.
[0] https://seo.ai/
by dazc on 3/25/23, 12:34 PM
Folks have been complaining about search quality for at least the past 15 years btw.
by LinuxBender on 3/25/23, 12:22 PM
With ChatGPT and other AI tools being introduced
Could it be they are de-tuning search intentionally so that people are more likely to be accepting of it's replacement? And I agree with you that search result quality has been dropping, at least for my searches. I can almost instantly find any comment on HN using Google however results for technical articles seem to be harder to find or require digging dozens of search pages into Google.
by bluenose69 on 3/25/23, 1:09 PM
Google maps is quite another thing. Nearly half the screen is filled with "helpful" information that is of no interest to me. Sure, I can make some of that go away on a given view but if I zoom in from a region to a city, that side panel reappears. Making things worse, the side panel does not change size if I narrow the window. At the size I normally have for a web browser, the side panel is half the screen. Perhaps it's a personality defect, but this really annoys me and if that side panel reopens after I've closed it, I normally just switch to apple maps or openstreet maps, although I might go back to the google product if it has a more recent photograph of something I want to see.
by tommica on 3/25/23, 12:46 PM
by vgchh on 3/25/23, 1:00 PM
Google has a good technology DNA. I think they need an inspiring leader, maybe another insider who is a strong engineer and a leader.
by HarHarVeryFunny on 3/25/23, 12:47 PM
If you rely on an LLM as an all-knowing Oracle then you're dependent on what data it was trained, how often it gets updated, and whether the web content you were hoping to find, or some close approximation to it, is statistically regenerated by the LLM or not.
I think LLM-augmented search such as Bing or perplexity.ai is the way forward.
Perplexity.ai is interesting as it's very capable, and despite being based on one of the GPT-N models seems to generate output quite a bit different to Bing/chat.
by shubhamjain on 3/25/23, 1:15 PM
The question comes up every year and the oldest one is almost a decade old. I admit we are at the juncture of a very interesting phase in the software world, and the threat is more tangible. But having seen enough hype cycles, I want to reserve my skepticism. Google is pretty fast for most of my queries. If want to check recipe for a Cheese Cake, I would much prefer to search "cheese cake" and check a link or a video vs ask ChatGPT about it.
Another reason for my skepticism is that sometimes projections can get overly-optimistic. Uber was supposed to be only a few years away from a fully autonomous fleet of cars. There obviously many problems that we are ignoring when it comes to adopting ChatGPT on a global scale (like cost of a query and wrong information). As an example, I asked ChatGPT, "how can i convert user agent string to browser and version in big query" and it told me that I can use "PARSE_USER_AGENT", a function that doesn't exists. I also have issues with how opinionated ChatGPT is and refuses to answer certain questions based on what it perceives as fair.
I don't know how future will pan out, but it isn't as crystal clear as people might think.
by kazinator on 3/26/23, 5:20 AM
Imagine a front-runner in a marathon race who doesn't care about setting records or beating a personal best, but only winning the prize of that race. He or she looks over her shoulder and can barely see the next runner in the distance. That front-runner barely has motivation to maintain pace, let alone surge ahead.
It will take a runner-up who starts to catch up to Google in popularity and seriously eat into their search business for them to do anything.
by Mizoguchi on 3/25/23, 12:41 PM
by mrobins on 3/25/23, 1:38 PM
Personally I find the way it’s organized haphazard and frustrating to navigate. However the info they’re a managing to put front and center before you click a link is impressive. I think there’s and opportunity for Google to harness this power and create the best possible power search interface.
I also don’t believe chat is the instant death of search. I think many would prefer a killer dedicated search interface over chatting with their computer.
Side note: as someone who loves a good old list of links, I’ve been using kagi.com and have been happy. Big fan of paid search as a model.
by breckenedge on 3/25/23, 12:50 PM
by ColinHayhurst on 3/25/23, 1:35 PM
We have seen noticeable and increased growth in usage of our "classic" search engine Mojeek in the same period.
[0] https://twitter.com/ColinHayhurst/status/1636720458564349952
by pirsquare on 3/25/23, 12:56 PM
Long story short. They don't give a shit of you and have zero empathy.
When the money from ads stop, it will be inevitable.
by glass3 on 3/25/23, 12:43 PM
by wslh on 3/25/23, 12:54 PM
I remember when Google search worked, I remember when Google Adwords attracted customers. All memories. It was better than Altavista and Yahoo Ads. We need a new leap. Don't care if it is about AI, GAI, or next algorithm(s). Startups were lazy in this space.
by selimonder on 3/25/23, 12:37 PM
Lets admit it - previous research loop was going for a google search then iterating on results, which takes time and effort. LLM based research (although could be misleading) is just much faster and more suitable for natural language.
It happened.
This doesn't mean that Google will be obsolete, if it leverages its collected data so far it will be a strong competitor. But Google isn't leading at the moment.
by eof on 3/25/23, 12:49 PM
I think Google will likely go through similar path as Microsoft; such a tech powerhouse and cash cow for so long, innovation became eclipsed by profit optimization.
Microsoft turned it around a decade ago with a successful cloud pivot.
Google would have to fail fabulously for minimum of a decade before we could even begin to start claiming it’s terminal.
by rvz on 3/25/23, 1:55 PM
They have YouTube, Chrome, Chrome Web Store, Android, Maps, Google Docs, Drive, Gmail, GCP, Firebase, etc etc and some how they are "dying".
The death of Alphabet has been greatly exaggerated on HN and in the markets. The fact is, it would take more than just ChatGPT to "kill" them.
If you said Yahoo instead, then I would agree.
by jleyank on 3/25/23, 1:26 PM
by Euphorbium on 3/25/23, 1:39 PM
by TradingPlaces on 3/25/23, 1:14 PM
by aPoCoMiLogin on 3/25/23, 9:44 PM
for me the search result is getting better, sometimes im looking for generic words via right click "search google for <word>" and the results are really contextual, like google is considering the page that i'm currently looking at, wichi sometimes surprises me a lot.
by nipperkinfeet on 3/25/23, 6:44 PM
by WesSouza on 3/25/23, 1:26 PM
Only use Google when I find no good results.
by Decabytes on 3/25/23, 12:49 PM
by arroz on 3/25/23, 4:10 PM
by sys_64738 on 3/25/23, 1:13 PM
by andrewfromx on 3/25/23, 12:57 PM