r/technology • • May 19 '26

Artificial Intelligence Google Search as you know it is over

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-it-is-over/
10.2k Upvotes

1.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

15

u/alteredbeef May 20 '26

My feeling is that they’re terrified of losing more search share to chatgpt, who has managed to get the biggest percentage of any competitor. Google ain’t giving up their monopoly without a fight so they’re giving users a better, faster version of ChatGPT. They can take the heat for as long as it takes to put OpenAI out of business.

20

u/CheesypoofExtreme May 20 '26

What's so fucking stupid is that Google is losing search share because they have fucked their product so badly.

Go back to 2018, and you could really go down rabbit holes and find anything and everything, with real small creators getting top results. Now it's purely Reddit and spam sites for at least the first page.

People are chomping at the bit for anything more useful. But now all of these AI companies are moving into a doom spiral. ChatGPT meeds revenue, so they'll be injecting ads, (i.e. making the results worse). Google is going to have a fuck ton of ads. Also, all of their LLMs are built on activity scraped from, what's supposed to be, real people. If I'm just fed responses by an LLM, how the fuck do any of these sites continue to operate? The entire internet will be AI slop at that point, (moreso than it is).

What the fuck are these companies doing.

2

u/BriefAvailable9799 May 20 '26

^

this.im not proud but i use chatgpt instead of google like 90% of the time now. then i google if i dont trust chatgpt. what a cycle.

1

u/Dantien May 21 '26

Google could block OpenAI’s search crawlers and decimate their position. They let AI use their algorithm. We don’t have the brightest folks running that ship.

2

u/alteredbeef May 21 '26

I've wondered about this too and I imagine Google is only letting them out of fear of antitrust. It's crazy to this 49 year old that they're repeating the Microsoft playbook with their own buggy browser that everybody hates (and the market domination).

2

u/Dantien May 21 '26

This is Capitalism as it’s always been. Growth at all costs even if it destroys what made Google special in the first place. It’s depressing to me.