[moralestapia]

GG Google and I couldn't be more pleased.

It may not be this specific iteration that kills it, but a search product with AI (and without trash) is what will dethrone it.

I'm already using ChatGPT for ~30% of the queries I used to use Google for. I prefer hallucinations to ads, to be honest.

They were right to call Code Red when GPT came out, but their response to it has been extremely poor, even when they had all their cards in their hands. The quality of their products has been increasingly worse with time, everyone (but their own VPs) has been telling them that, it's hardly a secret.

They literally just have to go through the first two or three comments on this site (or Reddit or w/e) and fix the extremely obvious pain points people have with their products:

  * Bring back verbatim search, make search *actually* work.

  * If I search for "italian restaurants", I want a list of italian restaurants not a blog post with someone's opinion on why italian restaurants should hire more immigrants because of blah blah blah ... I want to *eat* something!

  * The whole "vikings were black" episode ... wtf.

They kind of deserve it at this point.

[chubot]

OK but this is the same pattern as image uploading services - https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli...

1. google was a good search engine when it was less profitable

2. now that it is more profitable, it is bad

Importantly, it was possible for Google to be good AND profitable at the same time! Roughly from 2003-2013 perhaps.

1. OpenAI is nowhere near profitable ... it seems to be heavily dependent on Microsoft, and in some sense on Microsoft's desire to compete with Google in certain areas

2. If it ever becomes profitable, does anyone want to argue it won't get significantly worse? It will probably have a bunch of bad side effects, like Google's decline did on the web itself

I guess this is "normal", but it also seems pretty inefficient to me ... Part of the problem is that "free" is a special price that users like

IMO it would have be nice if Google search was sustainable at a high quality -- I think it easily could have been

[llm_trw]

LLMs aren't tech that can be free, the good ones are expensive enough that we have to move away from the malvertising economy that was supported by keyword searches.

Here's hoping capitalism starts working again with subscriptions so users are the consumers and not the product.

[avgDev]

ChatGPT is like a drunk expert. It says the correct words but might completely wrong. I've had some funny instances of it hallucinating.

[moralestapia]

"SEO-optimized" sites are equally crappy, if not worse.

You still have to discard a lot of information from Google, you probably just got used to it. Even though I still use it for ~70% of my queries, what I'm actually looking for is one or two pages down the list of results, the first ones being just mediocre articles around the topic of interest.

What's the first thing you do when you get Google results? You scroll down, it has become muscle memory at this point.

[ewoodrich]

I would say at least 1/3 of my Google usage is for local lookup queries like your example of “Italian restaurants”. Which as I would expect returned a list sourced from Google Maps in my area, then “Top $x Italian Restaurants in $mycity” posts from sites like TripAdvisor. So I’m not sure what you’re referring to with that example, that seems more of an issue for something like recipes.

ChatGPT can be useful for certain hard to Google informational questions but doesn’t help me at all for the boring “IKEA hours” type searches I do every day.