I’m really curious as to how on Earth did Google fumble the ball on this stuff? It’s hilarious that their search offering has been so bad for so long that the new Big Idea in Search is “What if you searched something and the returned result wasn’t garbage?”
It’s not a fumble, more like a fundamental limit of the public corporation. Google has an established cash flow that relies on search and people clicking through to websites full of more ads. Once Google perfected that revenue model, they were pretty much locked in. They could explore new revenue streams in new areas like cars or speakers, but investors would howl for blood if they tried to reinvent the search experience at the cost of revenue growth.
These LLMs change the revenue model too much. Imagine how many ads a person sees over the course of researching the best TV to buy. Clicking and clicking on dozens of pages and seeing hundreds of ads. In the Bing demo, they asked for the best gaming TV and boom, there was the gaming TV I just bought after doing the research myself the long way. No clicks, no revenue.