[panarky]

> My non technical wife ...

Reports of the death of Google Search have been greatly exaggerated.

If you believe all the reports on HN about everyone's non-technical wives and grandmas, you'd have a hard time explaining the all-time highs in global usage and revenue from Google Search.

I agree with you that Claude 4.7 Opus is better than Gemini 3.1 Pro, but it's also a lot more expensive.

For my applications, I can't find better price-performance than Gemini 3.0 Flash. And it hasn't even been upgraded to 3.1 yet.

I suspect Google's target is price-performance and not just raw performance, which is how they can serve LLM responses at Google Search scale and still set an all-time record for quarterly earnings of any public company ever.

Frontier model capabilities leapfrog each other every few months, and Google I/O is in ten days, so I expect the leaderboard will change again soon.

[jonhohle]

Unfortunately, I think Google is in the process of killing the golden goose. I visit so few unrecognized websites now and primarily rely on “AI mode” to answer my specific question rather than sift through a handful of possibly accurate pages. How long can that go on before those sites just no longer exist and the source of that knowledge or new knowledge evaporates. Doesn’t seem like that model is sustainable long term.

[bachmeier]

Honestly, I think the SEO virus killed that golden goose long before the first AI chat bot. If we still had good search taking us to sane websites, ChatGPT might well have never been a thing. I was posting (including on HN) about the vulnerability of Google's search business years before AI chat. It just happens to be the thing that filled the gap when usable search disappeared.