ChatGPT is consistently fast now and gives me much better results than Google. IMO Google has damaged their brand with their "AI Overview" which apparently is a meme/laughingstock amongst the middle school crowd at least at my kids' school.

It's weird because I love the Gemini models; they are very good; Google is fumbling this.

It’s really terrible, not only does it get a ton of things obviously wrong but it also gets contradicted by the first search result, and it smugly tells you you’re wrong in an authoritative tone as if you’re some kind of idiot for even asking it.

When the start of the search is organically moving to chatGPT & other gen AI services - how would users even go from here to Google ?

Google is effectively dead.-

Google is at 16 billion searches a day currently. It is not "effectively dead."

statistically based on engagement - chatgpt is 14 requests/user/day vs google which is at 7requests/user/day

Google has significantly higher user count overall but the usage trend is not in Google's favor.

Fair enough ...

... Was, Indeed, extrapolating. And doing so, considering that their "AI-oriented" efforts (to play catch up - with the "AI Summaries" and such) are being met with due revulsion.-

I think it's probably more realistic to think that the average person will find the simplified Google AI search tools to be modestly useful. Worst case scenario maybe they are seen a second tier to the new leaders/chatGPTs of the world.

Heck, Facebook is still wildly profitable. A bit different because of network effects and all, but that's a product that is entirely been transitioned to a terminal phase where they are extracting as much cash as possible, and it is surprisingly resilient.

The one big wild card would be a direct attack on traditional Google search by openai though. They potentially have a strong enough brand to do to Google what Google did to Lycos and Dogpile. SearchGPT could easily be a household name in no time flat, but I'm not sure OpenAI wants to focus on the old paradigm like that.

I'll take "modestly useful".-

I don't know if that is necessarily a point in favor of chatgpt.

The better a search engine (or AI chatbot) works, the fewer queries you need to make to find what you are looking for, so the numbers could also be interpreted as Google still being the more accurate tool for queries.

The better a product works, the more often you opt to use it. The better it finds needles in haystacks, the more often you choose to use it. Higher engagement is really rarely bad for a product outside of particular odd cases.

Google is on almost every mobile device that's not Apple.

This antitrust is the thing keeping Google going.

Probably also the reason why GEO is becoming as important as SEO these days.