[echelon]

Google has no moat anymore.

- Google search is on the way out. I don't know any of my peers who use it anymore.

- Coding models make doing extreme depth of work possible.

- Hoards of unemployed engineers now have access to 10x coding utilities and are looking for things to do. They will start clawing away at Google products.

- Just the other day, someone cloned Google Gsuite and it looked awesome

- Drive and Search will also be fungible products

- I'm itching at the chance to build my own phone operating system, and there must be thousands of others who want to do the same.

- Chrome can probably be replaced (Firefox gained a whole percentage point last month)

I don't think Google is safe anymore.

Two caveats that I'll give them:

- YouTube still has network effects and probably can't be dislodged

- Google cloud isn't going anywhere

[BeetleB]

> Google search is on the way out. I don't know any of my peers who use it anymore.

What do they use?

Of all my tech friends, colleagues, I'm the only one who uses Kagi. Another person uses searx. Everyone else uses Google.

Of my non-tech friends and colleagues, everyone uses Google.

[aqfamnzc]

Let me tell you about this new little-known technology that's been gaining traction in the last few years...

[janalsncm]

Sure, go ahead and ask the LLM who won the 2026 World Cup. Or nearby BBQ places open now.

Even assuming no hallucinations, an LLM can replace some use cases for search but not all.

[Waterluvian]

I tried both and it’s not even close which interface is better when it comes to answering a question. Google gives you stuff to sift through and interpret. AI just gives the answer.

Imagine you’re in the car or hands free or disabled and you just want the question answered.

https://ibb.co/whYmZWxs

https://ibb.co/JFkQbmJf

[munk-a]

AI just gives the answer... which you then need to sift through and interpret as it's often wrong.

Google's UX is terrible - but a search engine (a tool that can put you right into contact with the FAQ or forum where actual experts are discussing your problem) is always going to be powerful.

[Waterluvian]

For sure. But a search engine the way we both probably agree is powerful is not Google's business. Google wants to own the interface level where everyday users come with questions/needing things and Google owns that experience. And that part is dying very quickly.

[janalsncm]

The first of the two steps is a web search. The model didn’t answer from its trained weights.

[fpoling]

The model just asked the crawler to get a recent copy of relevant pages and used that to give the answer. That is why AI companies experimenting with browsers or at least agentic extensions to browsers as that allows to fetch on behalf of the user directly from the device with a residential IP and ditch expensive to maintain crawling infrastructure.

[Waterluvian]

Google search may survive as a backend service, sure.

[awad]

Do you have a free or paid ChatGPT license?

[Waterluvian]

Free Claude.

[devin]

"just gives you the answer" is a problem when it is offered without context, sourcing, etc.

Such is the case for people trying to poison--ahem "influence" LLM results for "what is the best restaurant in $my_locale". You're playing a dangerous game.

[Waterluvian]

> is a problem when it is offered without context, sourcing, etc.

Sure. But that's not what's happening here, yeah? Both examples are providing sources. Actually I'd say that the LLM is doing a better job at that. You click a button and see 9 URLs to 9 news sites.

I think for the "influence LLM results" fears, it would be ridiculous to argue about which multi-billion dollar American company can be trusted more not to manipulate you.

[FabCH]

Claude Sonnet 5 Medium more or less on the timestamp of the comment:

Prompt: Who won the 2026 World Cup?

Answer: Spain won the 2026 World Cup, beating Argentina 1-0 after extra time in the final at MetLife Stadium on July 19. Ferran Torres scored the only goal in the 106th minute, coming on as a substitute in the 62nd minute. It’s Spain’s second World Cup title, having also won in 2010.

Prompt: Nearby BBQ places open now?

Answer: (a geolocation permission request prompt for the browser followed by) Right in [redacted] both [redacted] (4.6 stars, open until [redacted]) and [redacted] ([redacted]) are close and currently open.

A bit further out but highly rated: [redacted]

Seems like LLM does a good job on those questions…

[krupan]

Did it do a Google search to learn all that up to date information?

[ssl-3]

Almost certainly. That's OK, isn't it? Folks have been Googling things poorly for as long as there has been a Google to Google with, and now they have bots that do it on their behalf.

The only issue is that the eyeballs stayed with the LLM, which allows it to hold a position that is potentially very powerful. This is particularly problematic with people who believe that computers are infallible.

[ashu1461]

On a personal level if I used to do 100 google searches on a daily basis, now I would be doing only 10. And it is the case with everyone in the tech ecosystem at least. So it would be fair to assume that there share has reduced.

On the LLM side as well, I have not seen much people using Gemini vs the market share of Claude / Open AI.

The assumption of the long tail still using Gemini because it is bundled might be correct, but I am not even sure if that is something that Google will be happy with.

[ffsm8]

Fwiw, I've done those kinds of requests before and it did so successfully.

It did use Google to provide me with the answers though, sooo...

[edoceo]

The LLMs I've tried don't do well with very new stuff. Like Zig for example, they tell me answers that were good for Zig 0.12 but we on 0.16 now. So I've got to feed them the latest docs, then do the AI dance.

[Forgeties79]

Whether it's a good choice or not sadly doesn't change the current reality. People now use ChatGPT as a replacement for google.

[BeetleB]

Really bad idea for a lot of search use cases.

[bellowsgulch]

Someone has to crawl the web, and it's not the LLMs themselves.

[worik]

> Of my non-tech friends and colleagues, everyone uses Google.

Me, almost, too.

I have some friends using duckduckgo - not many and only until Google is the default again...

[SoftTalker]

I've been using DDG for at least 3 years. Very rarely use Google anymore, and when I do it is when DDG doesn't find much and in those cases Google usually isn't any better.

[bstsb]

> Google search is on the way out. I don't know any of my peers who use it anymore.

bear in mind we're on Hacker News. Google's market share is still above 90% - in almost any other market this would be a ridiculous monopoly.

[hommelix]

> - I'm itching at the chance to build my own phone operating system, and there must be thousands of others who want to do the same.

Maybe look into contributing to existing alternatives like PostmarketOS.

https://postmarketos.org/

[ffsm8]

Please don't send vibecoders to established open source projects . Your literally sabotaging them if you succeed.

[echelon]

PostmarketOS is cool.

Let me revise that super abbreviated prognostication to hint at what I was really trying to say.

I think a lot of people are going to start to look at replacing Android and iOS, and some of these will be decently funded teams. Some perhaps not even based in the US.

Attacking the phone market used to be unthinkable. Not even Facebook could pull it off.

But now? I think it's open season again.

Even if the problems to solve are truly deeper than they appear, LLMs are going to give people so much energy to look past the difficulty.

[layer8]

Google’s moat is that websites aren’t blocking their crawler.

[echelon]

The once unthinkable is now changing.

https://nypost.com/2026/07/22/business/reddit-news-outlets-w...

https://www.wsj.com/business/media/google-search-publishers-...

[inigyou]

Cloudflare has just announced that it's about to start blocking Googlebot by default, because it's an AI crawler.

To which, I cannot say with enough emphasis: OUCH. This kills Google Search. All hail Cloudflare Search, the new center of the internet!

[WarmWash]

Google's most is that people use ad-block and back-door subscriptions.

Every competitor dies in the womb because "subscriptions are bs and ads are cancer" is totally normalized.

If you want Google to fall, start giving ad-loads or money to companies trying to compete.

[inigyou]

Or offer good value for money. I subscribe to Kagi and a few online newspapers. If you let me pay $10 every month for access to every online newspaper I'd take that offer.

But you can't be shit and also charge a subscription. There has to be good stuff behind the subscription.

[watwut]

> Hoards of unemployed engineers now have access to 10x coding utilities and are looking for things to do. They will start clawing away at Google products.

No way this is threat to google. For the same reason why the same hordes of engineers did not managed to compete with large companies up to now. And for the same reason they were not producing all that many novel small apps last 10 years.

This is winner takes all economy. Tokens or no tokes, this is not the econony of small competing companies. This is the world of big ones.

[amanaplanacanal]

If only there were laws about antitrust. Oh well.

[rebasedoctopus]

are your peers me, myself, and I? that is a wild claim. I'll start asking around but I don't think I could find one person that says they don't use google search anymore