That's how Google started.
Then they needed revenue.
Enjoy it til it lasts but there will be ads and AI search optimizations.
Then they needed revenue.
Enjoy it til it lasts but there will be ads and AI search optimizations.
Early Google was a very simple keyword search engine. Entering a question would confuse the algorithm returning results that sometimes matched the lower value words in your question. It was slick for the time but would feel tedious today next to the simplified output from free and local tier LLMs.
The reason Google and the internet feels tedious today has less to do with Google's ads and more to do with the gamed page rank results, the mountain of ads you find on websites that have aggregated all of the content that used to be useful on the internet and the lowering of information quality over the years.
Sometimes I have a question that would likely require multiple searches on Google.
But sometimes I just have a name or a broad subject and don’t want to have to formulate a question and wait for a long conversation style answer. If I wanted the 8086 manual or something. It’d be extremely cumbersome to use a conversation to find it instead of typing “8086 manual pdf.”
There is significant overlap, but LLM and trad search have their own independent use cases.
At the beginning Google search was all about returning the best result,but that's ruined partially because they put ads over search results and because others learned to tricked Google's algorithm.
The same will happen with LLMs.
Maybe not both but at least one of them.
I get no good programming information out of local LLMs beyond the very basics, but I can always find books and PDFs from trad search.
No one would pay it.
This is different.
OpenAI needs MS for support.
B2B software always has a bigger upside than consumer software.
By revenue, Microsoft’s gaming business is roughly the same size as Salesforce and Intuit combined.
What you possibly meant to say is individual accounts always have a bigger upside. The world is changing.
If you’re one of the biggest companies in the world, you can do whatever you want. Though I’d bet that Microsoft makes more money off of their cut from 3rd party games sold on their platform than off of the sales of their first party titles alone.
I don’t think it is some universal truth, but it was the reality of the time that people wouldn’t pay for search so they pivoted into advertising.