They have plenty of great tech for consumers right now: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Chrome, Android,..
You can perhaps argue that search might suffer because of AI but they've done a great job scaling horizontally into many verticals.
I don't think Google is going anywhere.
Let’s be honest. Google was amazing back then, now they’re just an ad-business flailing around in other side quests.
Related - interns these days don't seem to have any particular preference for using Google for finding information...
But moreso - whatever the default is what they use. They have zero attachment to Google.
Additionally these are all old products - even the company's more recent products such as Gemini feel stale and on unsteady ground.
Your narrative depressed Google’s stock price for years, and bears finally gave up since they kept coming out with huge earnings beats.
I would actually recommend using a LLM over normal search for that sort of thing, because SEO has ruined those high intent phrases. The AI equivalent of SEO is also a problem there, but it's so much less prevalent.
I personally like google over asking an AI. Esp. since something like google is a substrate without which an AI would be far more prone to hallucinations.
And that's where you're dead wrong. Absolutely wrong.
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.
Curious to see how long that lasts - YouTube and Google Maps were fairly mainstay apps for iPhones for a while, and eventually Apple cut the Maps cord to do their own thing. I don’t know if that’s from an existential concern of “we need to eventually move Maps in-house”, but given the Google of it all I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple is already at least planning on how to do the same with AI once the bulk of the usage evens out i.e. let someone else worry about it now while also getting a read on what rolling their own would feasibly require.
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.
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'm not sure what they do these days - it's about 20 years since I used an IBM Thinkpad to connect to an IBM pSeries.
So is IBM.
There was a pretty interesting article in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks back about how IBM is flying under the radar, and doing well by not taking the hype bait.
It noted that 70% of all credit card transactions on the planet go through an IBM system.
The problem is that those COBOL systems have to be absolutely provably correct, for both financial and regulatory reasons. LLMs can't do that. They're designed to be variable.
You can't vibe code a bank transaction system. "Close enough" isn't good enough in some fields. A minor glitch in a video game may result in screen artifacts. A minor glitch in a banking system can crash the economy.