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I agree, and I think it's half and half for me. Many times when I search, my query ends with a question mark. They're questions, looking for a simple answer. Those are the searches I have been going to LLMs for more and more lately. As the LLMs get better and hallucinate less, this is becoming more and more viable. Other searches are looking for a page. Where to buy a particular component. Where to download a particular library. Things like that. For that, Google is still useful. The thing is, I think the first kind of search makes up a huge amount of Google's business. I would hazard a guess that it actually makes up more than half of their search traffic, and the loss of that kind of query is going to seriously damage them. There's also nothing stopping LLMs from eventually giving us answers to the second kind of query either, as they start being able to ingest and incorporate real time data. To me, it seems inevitable that LLMs will kill Google's main source of revenue (search is 57%) and eventually their entire company, as much of the rest of what they do is subsidized by search. They may be too large at this point to adjust to this extinction-level change to the environment.



I would argue that answer seeking queries have lower commercial value, compared to queries about products or services.




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