The rumour I keep hearing is that it's like the Hunger Games inside Google at the moment. Total chaos and infighting at all levels, investors are freaking out over AI and Bard's middling performance compared to OpenAI and blood is in the water. Sundar may be forced to resign and Larry/Sergei deployed to rescue the company.
Whenever there’s a big shift like this it’s always tempting to look at the new thing as say how great it is - and ChatGPT is awesome. But it’s also worth looking at how shit the old thing has become. Google.com now literally delivers you an entire page of ads before any real results. It’s blatant profit-squeezing instead of trying to serve their users. This is their reward.
It's not just font end users feeling this, but advertisers too. Google ads just keep getting more expensive, harder to control and in many cases less effective. You have to, as an advertiser, give Google so much data about your operations and revenue to get the algorithms to work, it's ridiculous. I'm immensely suspicious of how they use the data they have access to about advertisers businesses.
Google entire business model is now about squeezing as much out of their advertisers margin as possible. It's only a matter of time before advertisers push back significantly.