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0 pointsnetdevphoenix5mo ago0 comments

What is Google's competitive moat? There's no product stickiness here. What prevents people from just using Altavista/Yahoo/[any other search engine].

You vastly underestimate the power of habit and branding combined together. Just like then, the vast majority of people equate ChatGPT with AI chatbot, there is no concept of alternative AI chatbot. Sure people might have seen some AI looking thing called Copilot and some weird widget in the Google Search results but so far ChatGPT is winning the marketing game even if the offerings from rivals might be the same or even superior sometimes

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bpt35mo ago

Google's competitive moat 20-25 years ago was being a significantly better search engine than the alternatives. That remained true for decades.

You can't say the same about ChatGPT. And Google wasn't spending $4 to make $1 almost 10 years after its founding, which will become an issue at some point.

AlecSchueler5mo ago

> What prevents people from just using Altavista/Yahoo/[any other search engine].

Google shows the results you're looking for. At least this was true when they were in competition with the engines you mentioned, they had genuine quality advantage.

tobias35mo ago

Google has defaults as their huge moat. They have Chrome and Android under their control and pay Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine.

Here in Europe this is mitigated by them having to show a browser/search engine selection screen, but in the US you seem to be more accepting of the monopoly power. Or it seems the Judge in Calfornia seems to think that OpenAI actually has a change of winning this. It doesn't in my estimation.

On the other side Google has a monopoly on Ads. When OpenAI somehow starts displaying ads, they'd have to build their own Ad network and then entice companies and brands to use it. Good luck with that.

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