[marginalia_nu]

They can, but if their competition isn't doing the same, their offering is strictly worse.

I'd guess given the amount of self-cannibalization Google has been doing the last few years, the fervor with which they've been sticking ads everywhere even to the clear detriment of utility suggests they're struggling to present black numbers through growth.

Having to operate at conversational AI service which is competing with their own main offering, at a loss, to run a competitor out of business is not what they want to do. Not with bearish investors, and especially not given the regulatory scrutiny they're under.

[arnvald]

Their competition still hasn't found a profitable business model, though. OpenAI started offering paid subscription, but it's unclear how well it's performing and how high their margins are.

Google's dominance might have ended, but this is a new market. Various players will try different business models and I'm sure we'll see someone offering an ad-based product

[visarga]

I think the Google era ended in Nov 2022 when chatGPT was launched. They had a good quarter century run. Keyword search on top of ads, spam and disinformation is not a good product anymore, and won't cut it after people's expectations moved up.

They can't even faithfully follow a search term, and instead return exactly what you wanted to avoid. Try finding "the shortest time for crossing the English Channel entirely on foot", it will tell you all about swimming, boats, even hovercrafts, ferries, but not about an immigrant trying to walk the tunnel.

[marginalia_nu]

I think keyword search is still actually legitimately useful and a distinct problem from natural language search interfaces, but Google has found itself somewhere in between keyword search and natural language search in a way where they're getting the drawbacks of both and the benefits of neither.

When a query fails and gives bad results, it's not clear why it has failed or how to fix it. This is above all very confusing and frustrating.

In part I think the problem is the insistence on using the same search box for both modalities of search. This is straight up a poor design choice.

It's also worth mentioning that they have an inherent conflict of interest in the business model. Since they sell ads, presenting clean search results with few ads would actually hurt their bottom line. But this is a limitation in their business model and not their tech.