Sure, but the narrative seems to be Microsoft has somehow cracked the puzzle and will leave Google behind which is not the case currently.

Google search has gotten so degraded in the past few years that people want something to beat thwn.

Hmmm. Yeah, now I'm starting to believe it too - I hope it does beat them.

They don't have to, they only have to be relative equals. It's possible chat GPT is a "dreadnaught moment"

Adtech is their main business. The quality of search suggests that it became less important to them.

Lower quality of search mean more ad clicks. I believe the quality decrease is on purpose.

The companies that can afford to pay for top billing in search results are also the ones that rank in the first or second places for 'organic' results.

Maybe Google simply can't squeeze these customers any further than they already are, but at the same time can't turn back the clock to a time when SEO optimization didn't really exist.

Bingo. Microsoft isn't likely to win the search battle against Google. However, they can (and seemingly already have) disrupted search as a go-to web destination/feature.

Google was worried Facebook would disrupt their Adwords dominance by having social ads.

ChatGPT, if successful (a large IF), will disrupt search and probably a dozen other business models.

I'm awaiting the true counterstrike from Google, not this initial flub.

> I'm awaiting the true counterstrike from Google, not this initial flub.

What if this was the best shot?