According to what exactly? Journalist speculation?
It's something I have experienced myself and observed in my surroundings, including many comments on HN that point to the same direction.
Now the internet has become homogenized to a point where outside forces are constantly telling individuals what where to go on the internet.
I use search for doing research and development which is different than shopping or socializing.
Whilst I didn't say that it did, would you mind sharing some sources for your claim?
That (Earnings Call 2023/Q2) says that “search and other” revenue rose to $42.63 billion, up slightly from last year.
Doesn't sound like a big growth story to me. Also it would be interesting to know what "other" means.
Where do you get the traffic numbers from?
> Please get out of your bubble.
Maybe you are in a bubble?
Traffic would be interesting, because it's not that impacted by other factors such as inflation, recessions etc.
It's also important to note that search revenue is not positively impacted by organic searches, which I'd guess would be the majority of what ChatGPT replaces currently.
As for the actual search traffic to Google, I can only refer to my own personal experience. I have certainly changed my habits after AI became mainstream, and as a consequence I now google a lot less. These days I will often hit up ChatGPT (or other AI services) instead of using Google, despite the "opinion" of ChatGPT perhaps being a little less accurate.
[1] yes I know that’s not technically true. I know it’s supppose to the present value of all future returns.
They now have to compete against ChatGPT and they are late in the game. To make things worse, their reputation suffered a great deal with techies who despise their whole image and are actively trying to "degoogle" their lives. This may well be the beginning of a slow downturn since these people have an influence on the tech choices made by more "normal" users.
What if it doesn't even matter if they can keep a dominant position of their search engine?
These antitrust cases appear to be just a sign of a much larger pile of trouble ahead for Google.