[ur-whale]

> Google is using AI at such scale internally they don't need external customers to recoup their investment.

That's assuming their flagship product remains relevant in an AI-powered world.

Which brings to mind: most of the big shops product (chatgpt, claude, grok, etc...) ALL rely on search, and NONE of them actually have a running search stack.

Which means, they must all be calling Google, no?

How does Google make money from that?

[smoe]

> That's assuming their flagship product remains relevant in an AI-powered world.

The big advantage Google has, in my opinion, is Android. I think there is a decent chance that people stop downloading the ChatGPT, Claude, etc. apps if they perceive that the phone just does the same out of the box for free. And I reckon the majority of people will prefer free, ad-ridden AI chat vs. paying subscriptions, at least for personal use. And on the B2B side, they have Workspace deeply embedded in a huge number of companies. So I wouldn't count Google out.

[trollbridge]

We currently have a Google Gemini Pro sub that is free for a year, since one is handed out to every person who goes out and buys a new Pixel, and likewise is also available for up to 5 family members. Codex and all included, and quite generous usage limits.

Despite this I cannot get my business partner to switch to Gemini (including all the very easy and convenient to use features that come with her Pixel phone) over her $100 a month ChatGPT Pro subscription.

The public perception of Gemini (or Google AI, specifically) is becoming quite poor because of the questionable results in "AI Mode" in a typical Google search. Google is really shooting themselves in the foot, because Gemini is quite good; they're creating an anti-brand.

[WarmWash]

The funny thing about Google is that Google Search is happy to serve LLM labs search results if it drives their metrics up. Just like Google Cloud is happy to sell off compute to OAI an Anthropic to drive up their metrics.

Google also owns 15% of Anthropic and Hassabis, the leader of Deepmind, also is an early angel investor in Anthropic.

When you really break it down, it's not totally clear that Google would even care that much about being the SOTA LLM.

[LorenDB]

> Which means, they must all be calling Google, no?

Incorrect. Alternate search providers exist, such as Bing (used by DuckDuckGo, for example) and Brave.

[ur-whale]

Yes, but all are still inferior.

And it really does not matter.

The real question is: which search service do they use anyways.

[ComputerGuru]

Bing is the easiest to buy programmatic access to.

But I think they don’t tell you because they sometimes use residential proxies to scrape search results the same way they used residential proxies to scrape the web.

[sroussey]

There are a lot of search APIs for AI these days.

[jeremyjh]

They really are not inferior. There are many different APIs with different strengths and there are aggregators on top of them that produce results that are significantly better than Google's. Everytime I accidentally use Google I'm shocked at how terrible it is.

[remus]

> Which brings to mind: most of the big shops product (chatgpt, claude, grok, etc...) ALL rely on search, and NONE of them actually have a running search stack.

Don't they? Based on traffic to some websites I run the big AI labs are very actively doing a lot of crawling.

[ur-whale]

> the big AI labs are very actively doing a lot of crawling.

Crawling isn't the same as search. Crawling is just the very bottom of a proper search stack.

There's a lot of layers and a shitton of infrastructure to run and/or pay for.

Mind you, it's possible they actually did re-implement all the layers, but why would they when there are already lots of suppliers out there and they are all already chronically short on compute resources.

I'm actually very curious to learn what they actually do wrt Search.

[msabalau]

Google's ad revenue has done really well so far in the LLM era, and wasup 12% year over year in 2025, and forecasted to do the same next year.

And that changes, then that's all the more reason for them to be investing in AI.