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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

> "Could a meaningfully better search engine realistically displace Google today?”

ChatGPT clearly demonstrated that displacing Google is possible. All previous monopoly arguments seemed even more flimsy after that.

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I think you’re proving the monopoly argument yourself: if they only way to compete with Google is an innovation that generations of scientists have been working towards, it does paint a grim picture of competition in this space. Besides, are we ignoring Gemini?

Google already used AI and language models before ChatGPT came out. If you wanted a state of the art search / recommendation engine you needed that innovations from scientists already.

That's what I am saying: if you had a better search/rec engine than Google, good luck making it useful without Google's search index, acquired to a large extent thanks to their dominant market position. This doesn't sound like healthy competition. ChatGPT had to change the whole game to be able to compete.

ChatGPT did not build a search engine though. They built something else (equally impressive) and then were able to use their weight to enter the web search business where most sites now have to allow them in.

While it's good that building other products is possible, it doesn't detract from the point that search engines are a de-facto monopoly.

(Not quite the same as a search engine, but to create a base model in an LLM, they pretty much did "download the whole internet" for it)

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