alt Hacker NewsConsidering the fact that very few people exit from AI searches into the web, rather than just ending the session (having received the answer they were looking for); it seems to me that this report would vastly overstate traditional search engine market share. Personally I’ve basically stopped using Google as my primary search. I usually start by searching in an LLM. Especially if the query is complex (e.g. give me a summary of USAs current lunar missions and progress towards a lunar base.) The only time I still go to google is for maps related searches. To find local businesses. But often in that case I will go directly to maps.google.com. I would like to see a real report on market share. I expect Google has lost a lot and hasn’t yet admitted it.
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> Especially if the query is complex (e.g. give me a summary of USAs current lunar missions and progress towards a lunar base.)
This terrifies me. The number of ostensibly smart, curious people who now fill their knowledge gaps with pseudorandom information from LLMs that's accurate just often enough to lower mental guards. I'm not an idiot; I know most people never did the whole "check and corroborate multiple sources" thing. What actually happened in the average case was that a person delegated trust to a few parties who, in their view, aligned with their perspective. Still, that sounds infinitely preferable to "whatever OpenAI/Google/whoever's computer says is probably right". When people steelman using LLMs for knowledge gathering, they like to position it as a first step to break in on a topic, learn what there is to learn, which can then be followed by more specific research that uses actual sources. I posit that the portion of AI users actually following up that way is vanishingly small, smaller even than the portion of people who read multiple news sources and research the credibility of the publications.
I value easy access to information very highly, but it seems like when people vote with their feet, eyes, and wallets that's not what you get. You get fast and easy, but totally unreliable information. The information landscape has never been great, but it seems to only get worse with each paradigm shift. I struggle to even imagine a hypothetical world where reliable information is easy to access. How do you scale that? How do you make it robust to attack or decay? Maybe the closest thing we have now is Wikipedia, is there something there that could be applied more broadly?
It seems like the key metric missing from this report is volume of referrals, reported over time. Ideally, segmented to user-initiated web searches, to filter out things like searches generated via a Spotlight search in iOS.
I’d be very interested to see the trendline of user-initiated search over time.
If you go Google something right now you’re not doing a web search like you were even a year ago - the first thing that comes up (and takes up most of the screen depending on your device) is a Gemini response to your query.
At the least it can be inferred that Google has fundamentally changed their main product to mimic a competitor, which is something you just don’t do if everything’s OK.