This is truly breaking news, and I assume Google's senior team will be even more concerned. OpenA...

This is truly breaking news, and I assume Google's senior team will be even more concerned. OpenAI has just formally announced that they'll enter search.

While Google is obviously very busy, after having invented the concept of transformers, but having slept a bit too long on the development of GenAI that leverages that technology, on catching up on the AI hype, and their Gemini models seem to be quite good. That said, the core business of Google still relies on the ad model of the search engine.

On top of these external challenges, I'm not the only one to have observed a decline in quality of the Google search user experience. Not only is most of the first page cluttered with sponsored content, but even the so called true search results are more and more AI generated-content noise instead of the true insight you were looking for.

I personally, instead of Googling, find myself to often just ask any of the latest LLMs for answers, mostly ChatGPT40 or Claude Sonnet, sometimes also Llama via Groq, (always watching out for hallucinations), or using Perplexity to find more obscure data, instead of Googling, and using Google only as a "phone book plus", for addresses and opening hours. I haven't been able to use the new beta of SearchGPT yet, but am on the waitlist and very curious to see how this will work.

Potentially, we're about to witness one of the most fundamental shifts of the internet economy, and maybe we will finally be able move away from the "pay per click" economy that has not only ruined search, but also media as a whole.

Or we'll find the emergency of totally new business models around GenAI, as the $20 subscription de-facto standard that OpenAI has set may also not be sustainable in the long term.