Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

This is something I've thought a lot about (I'm a software developer and used to be a writer/editor at a large cybersecurity company where I was responsible for generating ongoing organic search traffic).

What's different this time around is that it's much more _answers_ focused than _search_ focused, and it's not a smaller competitor coming in to try and play the same game, but a whole new thing.

PG invested in Phind explicitly with the notion that "our kids aren't going to know what a search results page is" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1rHPFiY6FA

AI services like ChatGPT are already cannibalizing search in certain areas (programming questions, knowledge questions, "what's the difference between" questions, etc) as they give objectively better answers without all the weird SEO and advertising cruft.

It's a wildly better experience searching for "traditional apple pie recipe" on ChatGPT than on Google due to the brutal amount of intrusive ads and over-optimization and the gap is just getting bigger.

Google can't meaningfully improve their search without killing their profits and growth numbers.

On the other side, we haven't even seen the real google killers arrive which are going to be in the form of better AI assistants (Siri, Alexa and Cortana that actually work).

While it's likely that this is the direction search is headed in, it's also sad because it's going to be yet another layer of abstraction over the world wide web. How long before the concept of websites itself is obsolete?

> Google can't meaningfully improve their search without killing their profits and growth numbers.

This is a really good point and might mark a dead end for google. Most of their money is made when people click off of search and land on an advertiser's landing page. Almost everybody in our circle here on HN is unsatisfied with most of those pages they land on because those pages are designed to win clicks, not inform people.

If it turns out that people want answers more than they want search results then google is arguably stuck between a rock and a hard place.[1]

Content creators are in for a hard time too though. Already in Kagi I can ask a question and get a really good answer based on five or six sources without having to view any of those sources. If that's the future then those sources are going to be missing out on a ton of search traffic. Maybe it'll wipe SERPs off the face of the earth, but it doesn't bode well for search traffic for real content operations.

[1] Maybe we should prepare ourselves for "sponsored answers" -- LLM-generated word salad that still somehow tries to sell you a product.

>give objectively better answers without all the weird SEO and advertising cruft.

i think you forgot a “yet” or a “for now”

> It's a wildly better experience searching for "traditional apple pie recipe" on ChatGPT than on Google due to the brutal amount of intrusive ads and over-optimization and the gap is just getting bigger.

So the differentiator is not that AI is inherently better but that the phase 1 of enshittification hasn't hit yet. There is no indication that AI solves enshittification, it's only a matter of time. In that case, why bet on it ? We already know the end result and it's shit.

Your comment seems to indicate that alternative search engines with different strategies might be better, because remaining in the minority naturally filters out the unneeded, and that's a more interesting strategy.

(it also implies that capitalism is a problem in itself and that is something I can only agree with)

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