I think it's safe to say that Google has had a prominent position, and that they have indeed abused that position to gain an unfair market advantage over other companies due to ad placement and strategic cooperations. I'm sure Google will remain the top search engine despite this anti-trust case though, at least if they can keep up with the competition.
The market is changing. Many people now prefer not to even use search if they can help it, because it's got so messed up.
They now have to compete against ChatGPT and they are late in the game. To make things worse, their reputation suffered a great deal with techies who despise their whole image and are actively trying to "degoogle" their lives. This may well be the beginning of a slow downturn since these people have an influence on the tech choices made by more "normal" users.
What if it doesn't even matter if they can keep a dominant position of their search engine?
These antitrust cases appear to be just a sign of a much larger pile of trouble ahead for Google.
It's just a logical consequence of search being convoluted with ads and content you aren't interested in (SEO). If your search query resembles anything close to a question, ChatGPT will outperform the plain old search results w.r.t. the time users have to invest to get to an answer or solution.
It's something I have experienced myself and observed in my surroundings, including many comments on HN that point to the same direction.
The quarterly earnings statement says something about, well, earnings. And earnings need not be directly linked to search traffic since Google has several revenue streams, also from other products and from selling data "wholesale." It is thus difficult to correlate earnings directly to search traffic.
As for the actual search traffic to Google, I can only refer to my own personal experience. I have certainly changed my habits after AI became mainstream, and as a consequence I now google a lot less. These days I will often hit up ChatGPT (or other AI services) instead of using Google, despite the "opinion" of ChatGPT perhaps being a little less accurate.
Again, doesn't say anything about traffic, just revenue.
Traffic would be interesting, because it's not that impacted by other factors such as inflation, recessions etc.
It's also important to note that search revenue is not positively impacted by organic searches, which I'd guess would be the majority of what ChatGPT replaces currently.
at least if they can keep up with the competition.
yeah like duck duck crap which after 12+ years and endless marketing is still a niche and still not that good as a search engine? The closest thing to competition is Meta, but that is social networking.
Even Chat GPT is not a threat to the mobile ads dominance of Google. Google ads are everywhere, Bing-Chat integration is just limited to search, and this is assuming people use it, which if Microsoft's failed 20 year foray into search is any indication, is not exactly promising.
