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Comment by boh | Hacker News Reader

It's funny that there's literally no indication that Google is losing any material market share but somehow Bing with a chat bot (that just launched this week) will, for whatever reason, dominate the market (it's almost as if Microsoft has a publicist or something). A part of me hopes people will take this seriously enough to force Google stock to sell at a discount. The expectations of consumer behavior as it relates to search and chatbots are wildly optimistic given that using a thing isn't as relevant as making money from a person using a thing. So far, chatbots don't lead to more sales or more ad revenue and assumptions of "potential" behavior aren't as speculative as they are unreasonably hopeful.

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A crisis of confidence is just as dangerous as a crisis of results. If users believe Google is losing users they may try other services. Internally it could cause them to make misteps in order to maintain its position that lose marker position, or causes a bleeding of staff. Also stock prices are set based on feelings as much as anything else, and it does appear there is at least some risk that G won't be making as much money in the future.

I think the evidence of any even perceived "crisis" is still lacking (besides these fun articles).

Agree, I too think Microsoft has publicists writing these stories.

I believe they have many publicists writing stories. I have google alerts on a somewhat niche technology and there are like 5 articles every week from small news sources writing about that particular technology. A quick google search by a decision maker will see all these articles and think, wow this is popular - so it must be good. I'm surprised more companies are not doing this. With the help of "AI" you could generate a bunch of "news" articles and they will get picked up by Google SERP. Even if noone reads the articles it will still make said technology seem popular.

What more indication do you want? A peer reviewed research paper?

Anyone who used ChatGPT frequently enough finds it difficult to get back to using Google. One specific query is all that takes to get an answer from ChatGPT which is on point. The alternative is to rummage through the top few links from Google and trying to construct the information you need after trying different variations of search phrases.

When the iPhone first came out there were arm chair pundits who predicted that no one would buy or use an expensive phone. But the people who actually used it knew that it was the wave of the future even back in the day. Same thing with ChatGPT.

Ah. Sweet memories of a legendary Steve Ballmer moment: https://youtu.be/eywi0h_Y5_U

I think it depends a lot on what your regular searches are. My recent searches were: a local restaurant, find which streaming provider has a show I heard about and it's ratings, look up website for a business, understand some concept, find a product and compare prices, search flights, search for an airport related service.

Except for one query, I don't think LLM could have helped me with the rest. The rest are monetizable queries, btw.

If a search competitor comes about and gives better results, won't it lose market share?

I think a lot of people realize google search results aren't great anymore. There's pages of dumb things at the top because the system is optimized for profit. Hence, almost anyone on HN adding "reddit" as a keyword to search results. Or news editorials explaining why searching for a recipe for eggplant parm will have an enormous website with a story about grandma and food photography shots before the 5 step recipe at the very very bottom.

And maybe there's some wishful thinking too.

It doesn't matter whether Google is great. It matters whether Google is better.

This is a battle of perception. Like Google always said, a new search engine is just a click away. So I feel their concern is real

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