Ask HN: Will ChatGPT Kill Google Search?
2 tolarewaju3 5 6/11/2025, 3:03:10 PM
For the past 20 years, whenever I have a question, I do one thing without a thought.
Google it.
But over the past year, I've slowly started migrating to going to ChatGPT first. Of course, I know that I need to fact check. But getting comprehensive answers beats scrolling through.
I feel like this is a big shift that isn't going away. And now I see Google getting rid of people in search. So is this the beginning of the end? Or will Google just morph into something else.
ChatGPT daily active users is 122.58 million, while Google Search's daily active users is known, but lets conservatively assume it is 2 billion.
You know the difference between 122.58 million and 2billion? About 2 billion. That is to say, Google Search is at a different league than ChatGPT.
This is before you consider how widely unprofitable ChatGPT is in its current form. There's no way they can scale using $20/mo (or $200/mo plans). Nobody in India is going to pay $$ to search for things.
My guess it ChatGPT will become mainstream like Netflix, where everybody knows its name but people will subscribe when they need to, and then cancel.
I agree non-AI search will go away and it will be a steep cliff - Google does not have a real moat against a significantly better product
Valid point. Though personally I've had my duckduckgo, bravesearch, and searxng eras.
Google search is still fundamental to various LLM quality.
When I started using local LLM, the lack of websearch made the LLM hallucinate like mad. Get websearch enabled and you start getting good answers.
looking at my history. i only websearch about ~10 times a day. Far greater LLM requests now.
>I feel like this is a big shift that isn't going away. And now I see Google getting rid of people in search. So is this the beginning of the end? Or will Google just morph into something else.
Obviously Gemini and Gemma are things as well.
I just asked Grok what search engine they use and they said Google but grok doesnt stick to just google.
It's not that search engines will die and disappear, you'll just be interacting with them from a new interface.