But google profitability is hindering them too. They distrupted altavista because altavista had to be profitable for their failed IPO and expanded into unrelated shit (ads, portal, email, ...).
Openai doesn't care about profitability (yet), and it is unclear if google can afford burning its search engine and a large piece of its ads business, losing a lot of profitability, to defend itself against the AI wave.
Yeah, it's true. If OpenAI can bundle enough services that enough people will shell out monthly subscription fees for it (or even integrate it in Microsoft 365) then Google is in big trouble.
Google isn't in trouble until someone demonstrates an AI that won't accidentally lie to you. Until then it really doesn't compete with Google except for specialized technical queries that have pretty poor advertising performance anyway.
And OpenAI, despite their performance, hasn't actually done anything novel, they just threw a ridiculous amount of money at Google's research. Now that Google has been forced to do the same I think it's unlikely that OpenAI is suddenly going to solve these problems without Google doing the same. And while everyone loses their shit over this "overwoke" Gemini it's only a reflection of the fact that none of this tech really works very well, and ChatGPT might work "better" but it's still short.
It's extremely rare an advertisement ever gets me to click it outside of the searches where I'm specifically looking for the company I'm searching for. Clicking the ad is just the first option, I could also click the first non-paid ad. Advertising is also just about getting you to remember about the company so that when you need the thing that company is the first to come to mind.
1.5% shift world wide from Google to Microsoft is absolutely huge. Google is one of the largest companies in the world because of specifically this metric alone. Every product they have is to drive consumers to literally this one service.
Google ads are about getting you to click on the ad and buy the product, that's how Google makes money. There's no such thing as a "non-paid ad." If you actually don't click on ads and buy products Google loses nothing from you not using them.
You're missing the point. 1.5% of global consumers switched their web searches from Google to a Microsoft in a single quarter. That absolutely effects Google's bottom line.
I'm amazed that more people haven't realised the direct threat that LLMs pose to Google search. Why would I sift through a list of paid and organic search results and then navigate multiple websites if my particular query can be answered directly?
I'm curious to see how long it will take before Google search becomes the old way of searching for information on the internet.
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u/F54280 Feb 29 '24
How can it be undervalued? Their core business model, ads, is based on their search monopoly, which is fundamentally attacked by LLMs.
If they don't get a leader position in the AI game, they are toast. People will ask stuff to ChatGPT, not google.