alt Hacker NewsTheir entire business is predicated on search dominance, which is now on much shakier footing. Agreed that those comments were ridiculous pre-ChatGPT, but now they have a genuine challenger.
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Search is now only 50% of the revenue. But sure keep the myth going.
That’s over half of their business, but they do have some diversification with YouTube, Play Store, and cloud services.
Some of their newer efforts like Waymo and AI hosting for Apple could turn into large businesses to make up for any lost search revenue.
They also have significant costs to maintain their search revenue, such as $20B a year to Apple alone to make Google the default search engine in Safari.
If search becomes less lucrative, they would presumably pay less for such deals.
So yeah, definitely a time of disruption for Google and they need to keep moving fast on many fronts, but they are still well positioned in multiple markets to be successful.
If by "shakier footing" you mean accelerating growth in query volume, ad impressions, revenue and earnings, I'll take it.
> which is now on much shakier footing
Is it though? As far as I can tell they continue to maintain total domination of web search, and LLMs do not replace search engines, they work on top of them.
I disagree
A model serves a different purpose from a web crawler.
I'd prefer to be able to find source material over steering a model I have no control over while managing hallucinated outputs without the ability to fact check.
Just because it sourced some materials using RAG doesn't make its outputs valid, accurate, or factual.
used to be. Cloud, Waymo, and some other bets have been paying off.
And yet, their search engine is enshittified beyond all belief.
This take only makes sense if you don’t know what people use Google search for. If you’re looking for your local Ford dealership, or to book a Carnival cruise, or need a disability lawyer, or to refinance your credit card debt, you’re searching for an ad. You’re not using Chat-GPT for that. You’re asking Chat-GPT about a research project. It’s stealing away all the hard to monetize searches and leaving the incredibly lucrative searches.
Your narrative depressed Google’s stock price for years, and bears finally gave up since they kept coming out with huge earnings beats.