1,295 comments

[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 454 ms ] thread
AKA Bing Search in ChatGPT.

So it is not it's own search engine and is still using Bing for its results just like the rest of them.

That makes for a fair side-by-side comparison, then.
If it's better than Bing or Google in presenting the relevant result in a condensed way, it's still a win for the users.
> If it's better than Bing or Google in presenting the relevant result in a condensed way

This doesn't matter if the results are user-hostile, as both search engines are.

Is it mentioned on that page? Didn't see it.

    To provide relevant responses to your questions, ChatGPT searches based on your prompts and may share disassociated search queries with third-party search providers such as Bing. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Microsoft’s privacy policy. ChatGPT also collects general location information based on your IP address and may share it with third-party search providers to improve the accuracy of your results.
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/9237897-chatgpt-search (TFA links to it in the How it works section)
Reference? This isn't mentioned anywhere and certainly is not implied.
No, it's using the Bing index. The generated responses are OpenAI

Many search engines use the Bing index but return different results

It will be fun to see how they stand up to Google and Perplexity. I feel they are a bit late in the search game, but excited to see what they cook
Anyone can compete as long as they have a sufficiently robust crawl dataset as a foundation, no?
A fossilized snapshot will only get them so far, and sites are increasingly opting to block AI-related crawlers. Apparently about a quarter of the top 1000 sites already block GPTBot: https://originality.ai/ai-bot-blocking

I guess they could be using Bing as their search backend, which would mostly get around the blocking issue (except for searching Reddit which blocks Bingbot now).

Certainly, countermeasures against crawler blocking will be a necessary component of effective search corpus aggregation in the go forward. Otherwise, search will balkanize around who will pay the most for access to public content. Common Crawl is ~10PB, this is not insurmountable.

Edit: I understand there is a freerider/economic issue here, unsure how to solve that as the balance between search engine/gen AI systems and content stores/providers becomes more adversarial.

AFAIK OpenAI currently respects robots.txt, so we'll have to see if they change that policy out of desperation at some point.
> AFAIK OpenAI currently respects robots.txt

I wonder to what degree -- for example, do they respect the Crawl-delay directive? For example, HN itself has a 30-second crawl-delay (https://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt), meaning that crawlers are supposed to wait 30 seconds before requesting the next page. I doubt ChatGPT will delay a user's search of HN by up to 30 seconds, even though that's what robots.txt instructs them to do.

Would ChatGPT when live interacting with a user even have to respect robots.txt? I would think the robots.txt only applies to automatic crawling. When directed by a user, one could argue that ChatGPT is basically the user agent the user is using to view the web. If you wanted to write a browser extension that shows the reading time for all search results on google, would you respect robots.txt when prefetching all pages from the results? I probably wouldn’t, because that’s not really automated crawling to me.
If it ends up anywhere near as popular as Google, those sites will have a financial incentive to allow the crawlers.

The average person just does not discover content without the search engine recommending it.

The whole issue that site owners have with these AI search engines is that there isn't a financial incentive for them to cooperate, since the summarization largely replaces the need for users to click through to the site the information came from. No click-through, no ad impressions, no possibility of the user being converted into a recurring visitor or paid subscriber, just pure freeloading by the search engine.
Anyone can compete as long as they have a functional URL and web page. Doesn’t make them good competition, and doesn’t mean users will use it.

The issue is that “AI search” has been a hot topic for a while now. Google (the default everywhere) just rolled out their version to billions of users. Perplexity has been iterating and acquiring customers for a while. Obviously OpenAI has great potential and brand recognition, but are enough people still interested in switching that haven’t yet?

> Anyone can compete as long as they have a sufficiently robust crawl dataset as a foundation, no?

There's some sticking power/network-effect/sticky-defaults effects, too, though.

It's _trivial_ to do a google search from anywhere on an android device with at most a tap or two. You can probably get close if a 3rd party has a well integrated native app but that'll require work on the user's behalf to make it the default (where possible).

Same goes for the default search engine for browsers/operating systems ... etc.

I will absolutely be firing off queries to google and GPTSearch in parallel and doing a quick comparison between the two. I am especially curious to see how well queries like "I need the PCI-e 4 10-gig SFP+ card that is best supported / most popular with the /r/homelab community" goes. Google struggles to do anything other than link to forums where people are already asking similar questions.

I have learned to seriously question my instincts on when something is too late as there are many niches to fill and this is likely a building block for broader functionality.

That being said, for all the talk about how bad google has become, I still prefer it to an unbroken bing.

> excited to see what they cook

Me too! I've really started to dislike Google search recently and am super excited we now have more viable options!

> I feel they are a bit late in the search game

It doesn't matter. Google was late to the browser game, yet now the whole world runs Chrome. Analogy applies 1:1 to OpenAI.

I have turned bearish on Perplexity recently, this confirms it
Perplexity was a cult in the first place.
I’m surprised at all the negativity on perplexity. I think it’s a great approach (base answers on sources) and their product seems to deliver on the premise.

That said, anecdotally, I find it’s a bit hit-miss: if it’s hit it’s a huge improvement over google (and a minor improvement over chatgpt), if it’s miss it’s still good but get the feeling you won’t get anywhere further by asking more questions.

Perplexity is a really terrible name for a product and that alone will hold it back from being a real competitor.
It's not like ChatGPT (or ChatGTP as half of people call it) is much better.
ChatGPT isn't a great name, but it's easy to say, spell, and remember. And at this point, a lot of people just know them as OpenAI, which is a great name.

Perplexity sounds like a parody startup name from the Silicon Valley TV show. Way too complicated and unnatural.

You’re saying that now, but getting the initials in “ChatGPT” in the right order took a while to learn, so I wouldn’t say it’s easy to remember, and it seems easy to stumble saying it, too?

It’s all about familiarity. Once people learn it, it’s not hard.

But it didn't matter if they were in order or not, because ChatPTG or ChatTGP all go to the same place via Google, etc. It could have been called Chat + [Any 3 characters] and been fine.

Perplexity is just a nonsensical word (for those unfamiliar with the concept) that is too long and hard to spell. They'd be better off just chopping it down to Lexity, or Lex, or Plexity, or Plex, etc.

Isn’t perplexity a normal English word? Does an average American not know what perplexity in the usual sense is? The word has a meaning outside of AI, too. Or would they only recognize „perplexed“?
The average person definitely doesn’t know what perplexity means, and even perplexed is itself a bit of an advanced vocabulary word.
in French it translates to ChatFart when you read it out loud.
It became a good name once it became a watershed viral phenomenon. Everything being equal yeah not a great name but it defined a new hype cycle so it got a pass
ChatGTP and other variants with a Levenshtein distance of 1 from ChatGPT have been typosquatted to death by subscriptionware wrappers on the App Store and the Play Store. Many of them seem to be quite successful.
Agreed, it's as if someone completely ignored the meaning of the word and just decided what sounds good for an AI app.
I've always thought that the name is very ironic and perhaps "certitude" would've been a better name.
A good language model is one with low perplexity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplexity

Reasonable name for a language model startup.

It would be a logical name if its customers were technicians familiar with LLMs, and not end businesses and consumers. Which is why Ford wasn't named Internal Combustion Engine, Apple wasn't named Graphics Processing Unit, etc.
Generative Pretrained Transformer is also a terrible brand name but it doesn’t seem to matter.
Because the name isn't Generative Pretrained Transformer, it's GPT.
Perplexity sounds no weirder to me for a tech product than than Google or Yahoo or Apple.
Those are all short and easy to say. Very obvious difference between them and a long complicated word like Perplexity.
Would False Positive be a good name for a medical screening service?
Same with 'Claude 3.5 Sonnet'.

At first I thought it was some piano piece like "Mazurkas, Op. 59" by Chopin, or had something to do with some French guy in the AI field.

It took me about 5 minutes to figure out that Perplexity wasn't the product I needed. I'm not sure this is either, but we'll try it out just the same.
@forbiddenvoid what is the product you need?
2005 Google Search

Edit: I recognize that I may very well be in the minority, but when I use search, I am looking for sources, not answers. Everything Google has done to get in the way between me and the people who have the information I want has been a net negative from my perspective.

The interjection of AI here is just doing more of that.

(comment deleted)
have you considered the fact that they may not want you to have information?
(comment deleted)
It's clear as to where Perplexity is eventually is going, and it will likely get acquired by Amazon. Here's why: [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41121821

One thing about Amazon is that I have never seen them overpay for an acquisition (as in they really penny pinch and negotiate hard). So Perplexity’s high price tag may turn Amazon off
I actually like Perplexity a lot. It's really good for doing research. But if this new chatGPT search thing is better, I'm gonna switch.
I have been using Perplexity with the AI engine set to Claude 3.5 Sonnet for a month now, mostly for programming related questions, and it has been amazing. I mostly stopped using google.
I do the same but with Kagi.
(comment deleted)
Hah, OpenAI is becoming an ads business too. So much for something new, same old funding model for every centralized platform on the web.
OpenAI has ads? I thought it was mostly a freemium business model.
I'm saying that by moving towards explicit "search" and "linking to sources" they have set the stage for being able to charge to be recommended by their search features (ie, ads and pay-to-rank, same as Google search).

There aren't any ads in their demo, we haven't seen the real deal yet, but I'll be watching HN for that day.

Why, just because search has ads therefore anything that is a superset of that must also?
Over the past two decades, ads have proven to be the only way to make money over the internet…
They're making $300 million per month in revenue right now, with no ads.
That is what Google makes in less than half a day by selling ads. It’s a rounding error on their monthly revenue.
Because ads bring money and companies love money
If they are making billions from subscriptions, why on earth would they want to switch to an ads business?
Might have something to do with the fact that they're also still losing billions operating their services at a loss!
Seems like the sane thing to do with would be put ads on those using the service for free.
but the capitalist thing to do would be to put ads on both the paid and free versions of the service and infuriate all your customers to add penny shavings to your short-term bottom line!
First ads on free version then "limited ads" on paid version while creating another tier for paid users for more money
No, the capitalist thing to do would be to optimize profit. Optimizing profit isn't some trivial thing, when there's competition (as there is now). It's literally optimizing the desire and will for people to pull money out of their wallet and give it to you. It's a chaotic system with many attractors.

If adding ads causes a reduction in profit, from people moving to add free LLM (there are many), then it would be capitalist, in the interest of profit, to not have ads. And, let's say there's a scenario where all the companies have ads, the capitalist thing to do might be to remove ads, to capture all the users that don't want them.

Sure, once competition is gone, capitalism stops working, but we're not even close when it comes to AI.

Making billions but spending trillions for no moat (GPUs and models aren't moats) means that the only moat they have are users. Users aren't paying enough to offset costs, the only way to get value from non-subscription users for their scale is through ads.
Slightly more accurate: they're raising billions making pennies.
Because it is never enough. We see this time and time again. Once they are making billions, the people in charge will demand that they start making dozens of billions, and then hundreds. The growth must never cease, because the moment you stop growing, you can't sell the dream that supports ridiculous PE ratios anymore.

Google was a very profitable business 10 years ago and the search was still decent. In the last decade they absolutely butchered their core product (and the internet along with it) in an effort to squeeze more ad dollars out, because it's not the level of profitability that they need to maintain, but the growth of that profitability.

Microsoft was a ridiculously profitable company, but that is not enough, they must show growth. So they add increasingly user hostile features to their core product because the current crop of management needs to see geometric growth during their 5 year tenure. And then in 5 years, the next crop of goobers will need to show geometric growth as well to justify their bonuses.

Think about this for a moment: the entire ecosystem is built on the (entirely preposterous) premise that there must be constant geometric growth. Nobody needs to make a decision or even accept that this is long term sustainable, every participant just wants the system to keep doing this during their particular 5-10 year tenure.

It's an interesting showcase of essentially an evolutionary algorithm/swarm optimizer falling into a local optimum while a much better global optimum is out of reach because the real world is something like a Rastrigin function with copious amounts of noise with an unknowable but fat tailed distribution.

<rant/> by a hedge fund professional.

This is such a good rant, and I think you should develop it into an essay and I think there is an important catchy natural equation to mine here.
Ha, thank you for the kind words. I've been thinking of doing something long form, I'm just unsure if there's enough of an audience in this age of catchy tweets and tiktok videos.

Full disclosure, I had no formal education in writing... I suppose all credit goes to the actual great writers I take inspiration from.

>It's an interesting showcase of essentially an evolutionary algorithm/swarm optimizer falling into a local optimum while a much better global optimum is out of reach because the real world is something like a Rastrigin function with copious amounts of noise with an unknowable but fat tailed distribution.

I've never heard it framed like this before, that's beautiful.

I would gladly read long-form pieces in this vein and style. Have you considered writing?
Just copy pasting the response to another commenter asking in similar vein:

Thank you for the kind words. I've been thinking of doing something long form, I'm just unsure if there's enough of an audience in this age of catchy tweets and tiktok videos.

Full disclosure, I had no formal education in writing... I suppose all credit goes to the actual great writers I take inspiration from.

If you consider complex forms of life serving as an entropy-increasing phenomenon, then you might as well consider that the evolutionary algorithm is governed by such goals. It's even plausible to take the human behaviors like increasing consumerism and growth-orientation as being connected to this fundamental thermodynamic drive. Perhaps we'll find even more efficient principles to drive our consumption further. <extending on your rant obviously />
You can ask the same for ie Apple where you pay a proper premium for products, yet their ad business keeps growing slowly into respectable proportions, and not by accident.
They get inspired by streaming services doing the same.
How long until advertisements are subtly introduced? I didn’t notice any specific brand of limoncello recommended in their demo.
I hope very quickly. The sooner they start competing with Google for ads the better.
Are ads what people want?
People want whatever they searched for. If the ads provide that, then sure. That's why Google and Meta are the size that they are...
Most of the time I don’t search for products so there is nothing I want to buy.
Google is the size it is due to monopoly power.
(comment deleted)
I don't want ads. But I can't deny that ads are the only business model with a chance of scaling to compete with Google.

If that's what they want to do in this space, which is not a given.

No but once ChatGPT starts threatening Google's revenue model, maybe they will start putting effort into improving their drastically deteriorating search engine.
they need to win search share to threaten Google's revenue model: take traffic from google.com, so google will sell ads. Going to ads busyness is not necessary for this.
But why is that good for me?

Why do I care if Google succeeds or dies?

If anything I want them to die for ad infested they've made the internet. I don't want ads in either chatGPT or Google Search.

Or search, Youtube, chrome and android could all see their enshittification ramped up, which might not be the outcome you want.
Honestly, if I can disable ads by paying them, then I'm ok with it.

Google will suck all your data even if you pay, and link the entire earth of services to your identity.

For now, chatgpt doesn't care, and I already pay for what they provide.

May they kill Google.

20 years old me would freak out hearing me that, they used to be my heroes.

You are thinking you can pay them to not use your data? Think again. They will sneakily use your data anyway. If not yours, then the data of people who do not change setting xyz. Oops, the last update must have reset that option for some users.
> Honestly, if I can disable ads by paying them, then I'm ok with it.

The modern maxim is: any content platform large enough to host an ad sales department will sell ads

Vanishingly few (valuable) consumers have zero tolerance for ads, so not selling ads means leaving huge sums of money on the table once you get to a certain scale. Large organizations have demonstrated that they can't resist that opportunity.

The road out is to either convince everyone to have zero tolerance for ads (good luck), to just personally opt for disperse, smaller vendors that distinguish themselves in a niche by not indulging, or to just support and use adversarial ad blockers in order to take personal control. Hoping that the next behemoth that everybody wants to use will protect you from ads is a non-starter. Sooner or later, they're going to take your money and serve you ads, just like the others.

You can pay to get fewer ads
So the issue is if you let people opt out by paying you’re left with a low intent, likely lower net worth group of people to advertise to. As a result those eyeballs are worth less. The advertisers will turn to other platforms if you only let the worst people see their ads.

Unless enough people all pay, the whole thing stops working. But there aren’t enough people who will pay because most people don’t care.

Tldr: the ad supported business model fundamentally doesn’t work if you let all your best products (you) opt out by paying. It requires them to pay an amount far in excess of what they would be willing to pay for the system to work.

There's some truth to that, but Netflix, YouTube, etc seem to be OK with both ad-supported and paid ad-free versions, so I think the logic you described does not always dominate the considerations.
I think you’re right that it’s not universal - maybe something to do with medium and attention?
They're definitely still using your data though
It's already happened in a subtle way via who got to partner with them to be displayed in results vs not.
2 years for ads, 6 years to remove the yellow background.
I think you’re being very generous with these 2 years.
Yeah, I suppose OpenAI also speedran the "make noble promises to not become evil / become evil" pipeline too.
I guess we're just calling any company that crosses some vague threshold of size/wealth "evil" these days.
Probably not long, some users already got A/B'ed into testing "sponsored results"

https://i.imgur.com/UpAptFL.png

The response on the left references specific products, but where's the evidence that it's sponsored?
Aside from the marketing-ish tone and specific deeplinks to product purchase pages, the prominent Amazon logo and product description headline implied some degree of affiliation to my eyes. It seems like the evidence is that it would be foolish not to take the money for presenting such an obvious referral of a motivated buyer.

Frankly the example they posted seems like a fairly happy one, where the user is explicitly implying that they’re seeking a specific physical product to introduce to their life. We’ve all seen where those monetization incentives lead over time though.

But you’re right—not even so much as a tiny word “Ad” like Google does…

It could just be affiliate links? Wow billions of dollars poured into AI so it can serve up referral links. A boring dystopia indeed.
This is not a sponsored result. If I search about my username that I use on my Mastodon account, it show a result like that...

Basically, this means the answer is based on a main webpage.

It shows the cute Mastodon logo and all :D

Not long before it's forbidden by law with rules like “if you say the name of one brand, you must name at least two competitors” I suspect.
That'll be the European version.
Don't Americans also have rules about hidden advertising like that in regular media?
American law generally favors freedom of expression.
(comment deleted)
There are several classes of restrictions on free speech in the US. These include: obscenity, fraud, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, false statements of fact, and —- most relevant here -— commercial speech such as advertising.

Advertising has far less protection than is ordinarily afforded to the kind of speech you might do as a person.

You're talking about the country that live-censor speech with beep when people curse on TV…
The American model prefers "sponsored material should be identified as such" though that's only active for broadcasting currently
(comment deleted)
Why would they ever want to sell ads?

They did not get addicted to selling ads, have billions in revenue from paying subscribers, and don't have to wean themselves off of ads (as Google and Meta would love to do).

Because Sam Altman needs to buy another Greubel Forsey, of course.
Why make $1 when you can make $100?
Because they are massively structurally unprofitable right now?
I'd be happy to have another Google clone, that doesn't have a login and is not a chat session. Go to https://search.ai , type my search query and look through the results, with ads on the side.
It is much more expensive to run a search query with AI. I don't think ads can pay for it.
How many human search queries does Google serve and how much do they make on SERP ads?

I can see OpenAI's revenue per search ending up higher too since the ads will be impossible to distinguish, so even more valuable for advertisers.

It's absolutely coming. I'm curious to see what their ad units will look like. IMHO ads in an LLM search world will look more like Facebook ads than Google ads. Brand advertising will stay focused on YouTube while click to buy and click to download are probably the best fit for the medium.
Asked it to generate code for a library that was released in the past year - GPT-4 couldn't do it and this one just did it flawlessly. I am super impressed.
Hello bot. This is a search functionality not a new model.
Maybe you don't understand how this works?

It's able to query the relevant documentation, put it in its context and then use that to generate code. It's extremely relevant to giving existing models superior functionality.

I haven’t yet tried it yet. But that comment seemed extremely vague and misleading.
Same! (asking it to write code for the foss lib I maintain). This is immediately very useful.
Can it find obscure sites like marginalia does or personal blogs posted in hn or it's just another bing + ai summarizer ?
I asked for long tail blog posts about interesting places to visit in Paris. I got one result; from an obscure website called Vogue.
That link just takes me to what looks like a normal chatgpt prompt. (I tried asking it the same things they showed in the article and I just get generic AI answers, not web search results.)
Only available for Plus subscribers
(comment deleted)
Are you plus or team user and logged in? The link is to the normal chatgpt prompt, but with the "Search" button enabled.
Im not logged into GPT (am subscribed for this month tho on my iPhone but that's separate) and able to do a web search and or ask GPT a question.

Actually i am logged into my iCloud on my macbook so guess that's why im seeing the search on that device of mine (not seeing on another where Im not logged into iCloud).

"Introducing" without actually just linking the search page.

That's not an introduction, that's a teaser trailer.

If they want this to be a viable search it needs to be available quickly, and anonymously from something quick to type in.

Google would have been annoying as shit if you had to go to google.com/search , let alone then log in.

I mean, until there is an alternative in the space that has a (good), free, anonymous ai web search then I think we can probably assume you are confusing what you want with what is "viable"
It's available today for Plus users at chatgpt.com.
Using search with log-in is pretty big red flag for me.
Is there any indication they're willing to improve on google in terms of e.g. excluding commercial results? If not it's not clear how this improves anything. Google has been excellent at semantic search for a long time; the issue has been the lack of controls to filter out the SEO bullshit and to remove the AI stuff from the top and the right of the results. It's been way too easy to game search with sufficient funding for well over a decade now and the AI-generated crap is a long way from production-ready (in terms of quality; obviously it generates something).
Yeah . It needs to filter seo optimized articles first and search more niche sites or it will be your average chat gpt with search project from github.
Could OpenAI make it impossible for startups to try to build AI search engines by signing all these paid agreements with publishers?
I hope so!!! These AI startups are hot garbage! did you see what the "suno" losers did?
(comment deleted)
(comment deleted)
LLMs have the chance to cannibalize the web and become the primary interface for knowledge. But if websites remain the final destination, it’s good for content creators.

The only other way to kill the web without killing LLMs in the process would be to create a way for people to upload structured public content directly into an LLM’s training. That would delay public content into release batches unless training can be sped up significantly.

“Way to put public content directly into an LLM training” - sounds like Chatgpt
I’m imagining LLMs might eventually have an upload tool, similar to Google’s site map upload, for registering content proactively instead of needing to be discovered through crawling the web or training on chat data.
So glad that we're boiling the ocean for this.
we're not boiling the ocean; neither literally nor (more crucially) metaphorically

it's okay, we're not destroying the world and you're not a better person because you purportedly care about what humans are supposedly doing to the world and because you think the rest of us don't

I asked it the current weather in my area and the temperature was off by 23 degrees F.
What the hell did you ask it / what was the source? I just did the same thing and it gave me the correct answer and used my countries best known meteroligcal site?
It used good sources but appeared not to extract the information correctly.

Repeating the same query in the same chat session gave me an accurate answer.

I gave it a quick spin and my initial impression is much worse than perplexity.
Is this more than just ChatGPT with search API resulted concatenated the prompt?

It feels like it might be. It feels tasteful in the same way that Apple ecosystem integrations just work really nicely and intuitively. But then again, there is an art to keying and retrieving embeddings, and it might just be that.

Makes me question why Google never bothered to create something like search sessions which could be enriched with comments/notes and would be located in a sidebar just like the chats in ChatGPT/Claude/Mistral are.

They really had the potential to do something interesting, but were just focused on their ad metrics with the "good enough" search box. What have they been doing all the time?

Collecting people's data and making money from that.
Google doesn't make money from "collecting people's data", they show you ads.

If they're collecting data it doesn't even work; I make no effort to hide from them and none of their ads are targeted to me. Meta, though, they're good at it.

How do you think Google's ad business works?
For Google Ads, personal data collection alone is not as useful for making money like ordinary people imagine. And you don't really want to "sell" the data: why would you help your potential competitor to bootstrap their ads business for a discounted price? The real deal is the network and ecosystem itself, which is extremely hard to replicate. As a GP said, Meta is doing much better on behavioral targeting since they have a much better idea for each person's history though. And I work in the ads business, so you don't probably have to ask the same question again.
No data, no targeted ads. Simple as that. Whether some other dystopian company does it "better", does not matter. I asked them how they think Google's ad business works and you have not provided an answer to that question either, even though you state, that you work "the ads business". (At Google?)

No offense, but you stating, that you work in the ads business rather makes me doubt, that you are talking from an unbiased point of view and makes me suspect, that there are motives at play here.

Actually the statement, that Google doesn't make money from personal data is kind of ridiculous. If they didn't make any money from that in one way or another, they why would they waste so many resources on collecting that data in the first place? It is really obvious, that they do make money with that data. Their other products are failing left and right. It has become a meme, when Google kills yet another of their products.

You don't need targeting when you own a search engine; if someone searches for "buy PS5" you show them ads for a PS5.

> It is really obvious, that they do make money with that data.

Google doesn't have to care about making further money because they have an infinite money machine from their monopoly on ad auctions. It's better to think of them as just doing whatever Larry Page thinks would be cool.

They mostly don't collect it though, like they don't do targeted ads in Gmail.

Can you tell me a bit more ? What do you mean by search session ?
Let's see, if I go to " ⋮ -> History -> Grouped History" on the top right of the Chrome browser, I see a "Search History" ( chrome://history/grouped ).

For example `8 hours ago: "autohotkey hotkeys"` with 4 links to pages which I visited while searching.

But this is a Chrome feature, not a Google Search feature. https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity does (sometimes? can't see it right now) have a grouping feature of all the searches made, but this is more of a search log than a search management feature.

So chrome://history/grouped is the closest to what I mean, but I can't pin or manage these history groups, enrich them with comments or even files, like pdf's which could then get stored in Google Drive, as well as get indexed for better searches.

oh I thought you meant something like commenting under search result links like youtube videos.

I might be mistaken but i think ff mobile does something similar of grouping search session

the FAANG giants have been government assets for ~15+ years [0]. they don't have to turn a profit every quarter, innovate, or make their search any better because they no longer play by the rules a normal business does. they are a critical "too big to fail" component of the state's global surveillance system.

[0] https://static1.makeuseofimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/upl...

OpenAI is Microsoft. Microsoft is a FAANG giant.
How is that relevant? Microsoft bought OpenAI, didn't create it by R&D, so the assertion stands: giants don't do new things, for whatever reason.
The amount of fundamental breakthroughs at places like IBM, Bell, Xerox, all beg to differ with you.

In some fields of CS, places like MS research garner nearly 50% of all top conference publications.

Microsoft is literally not in "FAANG". But they are in MANGA.
Before FAANG the acronym was MAFANG, but due to too much closeness to a slang word, the political correct crowd change it to FAANG. Also, just as a side note, Microsoft is a trillion worth more than the "G" in FAANG.
FAANG or MAFANG or MANGA are still silly because they include Netflix which is completely unlike and smaller than the other giants.
The FAANG acronym was actually about growth rather than size, and their stock was performing like a tech stock for a while. But yes, they don't belong because they're actually a media "manufacturing" business, although a successful one.
Microsoft is their leading investor. They don't technically own OpenAI.
And technically Musk was not the wealthiest man in the world when he bought Twitter, because he didn't had that much cash laying around in his bank accounts. And yet, when wanted, or more precisely put in corner to do so, he did shit 50 billions and bought it.

OpenAI is Microsoft, technical details don't matter here, only money.

Cash isn't technically all wealth
Not just surveillance. Power projection. I wonder what impacts you can have on foreign economies by playing with quality of these tech giants outputs?
Linking the slide deck that caused Google to start encrypting the traffic between their own data centers running on their own fiber is perhaps not the most compelling argument that Google is a state asset.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/tech-companies-s...

You think it is so hard for the NSA to have a tap within Google's datacenters?

You think Google could say no to NSA if they were asking nicely to put a tap?

Encryption between datacenters is to keep away other state actors, not the US.

> You think it is so hard for the NSA to have a tap within Google's datacenters?

Yes

> You think Google could say no to NSA if they were asking nicely to put a tap?

Yes

> they don't have to turn a profit every quarter,

And, yet, aside from Aramco, they are the most profitable companies in the history of the world.

> they don't have to turn a profit every quarter,

What does this mean? Like, I work there and I’d be pretty annoyed if they stopped turning a profit as a collapse of the stock price would affect my compensation.

It’s interesting to hear this take because I’m used to hearing the opposite: that Google is too focused on increasing short-term profit at the expense of product quality.

I guess now Google's search stack is too complicated and not many engineers understand what to do in order to introduce a novel, big feature integrated into the full stack vertically and horizontally. And those few capable of doing so are probably completely out of bandwidth, so some random ambitious PM cannot pull their hands into uncertain green field projects.
Chrome did add a sidebar that shows search sessions (queries grouped with the pages you visited on that topic). Used to be called "Journeys". I don't think you can add notes. I never found it useful in the slightest and I doubt notes would have made it any better. Chrome has been adding random UI features like that over time, but I haven't found any of them at all useful in many years.
Doesn´t Bing Copilot provide this for free?
Looks like they've also enabled advanced voice mode on the windows desktop app.

Does not support search for anyone wondering.

Looks like this was timed to coincide with Google adding search grounding data to Gemini API: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42008834 // https://developers.googleblog.com/en/gemini-api-and-ai-studi...
They are taking a page out of Microsoft’s strategy of clouding out all sunlight.
My first memory of something like this was the rushed Google Wave announcement occurring on the same day as a Bing rebranding launch (if memory serves, the domain registration timestamps for the Google domains were also highly coincidental but I've long since forgotten with what)
The new web search icon appeared for me straightaway in the ChatGPT macOS desktop app, within an in-progress conversation, without even having to restart. Before I'd even seen this official launch announcement. Very smooth!
"""Search will be available at chatgpt.com (opens in a new window), as well as on our desktop and mobile apps. All ChatGPT Plus and Team users, as well as SearchGPT waitlist users, will have access today. Enterprise and Edu users will get access in the next few weeks. We’ll roll out to all Free users over the coming months."""

Can confirm that free users who signed up for the waitlist can use it right now (even if they didn't actually get in)

Can confirm this as well. I switched to free around a month ago and got access to this today. I did join the waitlist some weeks ago.
I signed up for the wait list as well and got the email. However there is no search button on the web interface (free tier). Is there anything I am missing?
I don't think so. I didn't do anything else.
Try typing /Search in the chat