It took Google a decade before they released Chrome so OpenAI has plenty of time to have a Chrome moment. Maybe it'll be something that comes from the OpenClaw acqui-hires?
During that time - as was pointed out elsewhere - Google search was simply way better than the alternatives - embarrassingly so. It also paid the Mozilla foundation lots of money to be the default.
Google wasn't bleeding money like crazy at the time. Google was operating in a post-hype cycle. We are most likely somewhere in an epsilon around the peak of the AI hype and OpenAI is more comparable to AOL or Yahoo. One striking similarity is the inability to innovate themselves, instead relying on copying others or acquiring.
The OpenClaw guy is surely a decent product person, but OpenClaw did not innovate in any real sense. He was just pushing an existing idea to the limit without any concern for quality or security. It had its hype moment, it inspired a bunch of people, and might find its own niche, but it is a flavor of the week kind of thing. I've been getting a lot more cold-calls by non-technical people in the last few weeks thanks to it. Congratulations, the quality threshold that justifies my response rose in equal measure. Nothing was gained, just a lot of tokens spent.
Um. Google has already integrated Gemini into Chrome. I'm not sure what you mean by "OpenAI has plenty of time to have a Chrome moment". If you're just referring to the browser wars, the original wars were fought (furiously) between Microsoft, Mozilla, (and to a lesser extent Apple). Microsoft thought they had won, and then Chrome came out.
Yeah but the only alternative that's actually better is paid. Google is still best ad supported search engine out there. There's no one obvious to turn to or recommend.
The best free alternative to Google right is ironically $preferred_llm_provider and ChatGPT is the obvious uncapped free option. I think free will end up being OpenAI's most if they manage to make it profitable.
> It’s not anymore (actually google is awful now) and people are still using it
if people are still using it, then it's really one of the few things, right?
* you are wrong and it's not awful
* it _is_ awful but good enough for normal people to never care about alternatives, which are anyway not even very easy to find given the absolute stranglehold google has on that slice
either way not quite the same as choice of llms today.
I am using duckduckgo for a decade. But especially, I am using Firefox Saved searches a lot. I type mdn in the bar, and it searches in the Mozilla developer network. osm is openstreetmap, so is stackoverflow, w is Wikipedia, yt is YouTube... I often know on which website I will find the info anyway, so I use less a generic search
I used Kagi for several months, I guess I'd at least recommend trying it out.
I stopped using it, though, and I can't honestly say I've missed it. It was nice not having sponsored results, I guess, but overall it didn't feel like a transformative experience.
Google was better, but I'd argue that, say after 2014 or so, for the vast majority of my searches there was no real difference with Bing, and in some areas Bing was better (e.g. some aerial imagery in maps). Bing still never made a considerable dent in Google's market. I can easily see ChatGPT being a similar story.
Google was clearly superior fo a long time. They got close to 90% before enshitification started in earnest. We are not at that stage yet with AI chatbots.
Also, Google benefited from being the default on mainstream OSes. When people have to download an application, getting one or the other does not take more effort. Yes, OpenAI being tightly integrated within Windows, Android, and iOS would be a moat. That’s not the case and it is unlikely to happen. Google will go with their own and Apple won’t put itself in a situation where they are reliant on a single company, they got burned enough times.
Also which search engine was the default was a massive factor - that's why Google paid for that.
If Google hadn't controlled Chrome, and or paid for defaults - they could have pretty much lost all their traffic overnight - ( if they weren't better ).
We are at a point though where when average people think of "asking AI", they instinctively think of ChatGPT. That's a big thing.
All OpenAI has to do is not fall behind too much to the point where an alternative can generate enough hype to take the crown (see AltaVista and Google)
Search is easy to monetize with ads and less expensive to operate. Unless AI services can do the same thing, they'll have to charge money at some point, and then customers will look for the cheapest.
All of googles products are unique in some way and have genuine moats. The search engine was the best. The ecosystem was there and pretty good. Docs had online collaboration. And on and on.
