The comment you replied to makes no mentions of timelines, and everything they said applies up to the point the first mover falls, which is clearly not the long term per your own argument.

I don't give a fuck about Bing, frankly, but ChatGPT (the actual first mover here) has already replaced a lot of what I used Google for during a work day.

I'll be their paying customer soon. It would be great if that meant I had privacy as well, but I kinda bleakly realize that that might be a bit of a pipe dream.

Over the past 2 weeks I’ve barely used Google. I just ask ChatGPT. The results it produces are just superior to Google in every way.

The big improvement in the chatgpt integrated by bing is that it can take today's search results into the chat to analyze seamlessly (after all, Bing already has all the search results cached internally). ChatGPT as it stands has old knowledge only unless you paste in the results you want to analyze.

If I were the EU, I would perhaps consider slapping restrictions on Google's Chat AI (say, Bard) as being a separate field (AI-Assisted Search) being propped up by a monopoly in Standard Search. That would hurt Google's dominance quicker than any other action. Same for the DOJ.

Remember how much trouble Microsoft got into for having a basic monopoly on desktops with Windows, and trying to bundle Internet Explorer? Replace Windows with Standard Google, and Internet Explorer with AI-based Google Search. You'll cut Google off at the knees with that move. And even if they survive the ~4-5 years litigation, they'll be severely hampered, kind of like how Microsoft was with the mobile phone market.

I have switched to Bing and Edge, then wrote a script to rack up points in hopes that I get moved up for the new BingGPT. Google search results have been trending toward crap for a while from my POV. 'Google it' is sticky, but I absolutely have not missed a beat with Edge and Bing. In fact, Edge has been a really pleasant surprise with features Chrome doesn't have. A calculator in the side bar is fracking awesome!

>> A calculator in the side bar is fracking awesome!

Another case of the browser doing what the OS and Desktop environment should be doing. I like to point at tabs - DEs and GUI toolkits never really came up with a good way to handle multiple documents well.

I think every major OS ships with some sort of calculator. The problem is discoverability. If you're in the middle of browsing, it's quite a bit of effort to say "oh that's right I have a calculator on here let me just find it in the start menu/Applications folder" as opposed to it just being there in the same app you're already using.

Widgets would be a potential solution but they keep being tried and abandoned soon after in desktop OSes.

In linux I press the super key (windows key), type "calc" and enter.

In Mac Os one can use spotlight with cmd + space with similar results.

Or sometimes I check a calculator I implemented myself (shameless plug: https://getcalculator.app/)

I mean, you can do Win+R and then "calc" on windows too, but that's still context switching and having to remember it's there.

Once again, compared to it just being there in front of you and ready to go that's still work to do to get it there.

On my mac I just use the built in calculator in spotlight. So cmd+space opens the spotlight search widget and then I can just type in whatever I need calculated. Not sure if something like this is built into Windows? More often than not I use Google as my calculator when on Windows.

I use Raycast for the same, but does that do multiple calculations? Ie. 184 + 64 then multiplied by 4, etc.

You can do it all as one big expression with parentheses and such but if you're doing a bunch of calculations on the go that could get repetitive, and one wrong Esc and your calculation goes away.

> Widgets would be a potential solution but they keep being tried and abandoned soon after in desktop OSes.

There's still a calculator widget for the MacOS notification center. It's accessed in any app through a trackpad gesture or by clicking on the date/time in the menu bar.

For now. This is what, the third iteration of widgets on Mac?

The fact that it seems to be similar enough to the iOS implementation of them gives me hope, but only barely.

You also need to know the feature exists (they had notifications before widgets, people might not know it was updated to support them), that there exists a calculator widget, and to add it before you need to use it. That's the same discoverabiloty problem, with the added wrinkle that functionality changed in Monterey.

> For now.

For most of the past decade. I believe widgets were added to Notification center in 2014.

High Sierra widgets are the second implementation I mentioned.

Dashboard was first, and then they were reimagined as iOS-style in Monterey.