[starfallg]

>Easy. Google is basically spyware. It's an advertising company, and their product is you.

This is such a flippant and facile response.

Google isn't a advertising company, it is a tech company that gets the majority of its revenue via selling advertising. This can change, and also likely to change in the next decade or so.

The reason things are is that nobody was willing to pay for search - it's a product with a very low incremental cost. The market dictated this operating model, and nobody has been able to upend this model so far, not even OAI. The numbers just don't work out. Do you think OAI can continue to subsidise free ChatGPT queries with paid ChatGPT Plus subscriptions? Almost certainly not.

[Melatonic]

I think actually people probably are willing to pay for search - Google just did such a damn good job for so long it made it impossible for a competitor to pop up

And now that their core product is getting worse I am paying for search

[Eisenstein]

How else should someone take the statement 'that is the type of search that Google makes no money from' when someone explained what type of searches they do? If Google doesn't make money from it, they don't develop it for search apparently, which is why they haven't progressed in search beyond advertising. You can argue that it needs disrupting, but concluding that 'they make their money from advertising' when that was directly stated by you is not flippant or facile, it is deduction.

You can't eat your cake and still have it. If they refuse to develop an income stream that isn't related to advertising while using practices that use their dominant place in the market to buy other technologies or shut them down, then saying it isn't their fault that the revenue is only advertising is either disingenuous or naive.