Google showed that providing an input field in which people can put their questions and then display ads next to the answers is one of the best business models ever. If not the best business model ever.
Google was free, open and without ads in the beginning. It is just too tempting to become the Google of the AI era to not try and replicate this story.
Microsoft is trying it too, but for some reason, they do not provide the simple, clean user interface which made Google successful. I always wondered, why they didn't do that with Bing search. And now with Bing copilot they chosen the same strange route of having a colorful and somewhat confusing interface.
Google.com's "clean UI" differentiator gave it a first-mover advantage compared to the average 90s search engine, but that's as far as the UI impact goes.
From 2007 onwards, Google has maintained its dominance through decidedly non-search channels: the primacy of Youtube, the Chrome browser, Android OS, and of course, paying Apple billions to make Google its default search engine.
>It looks like 6 out of 7 windows users switch to Chrome for some reason. If not for the cleaner interface - why?
They don't switch to Chrome. They're already using Chrome. And odds are, they probably have been since the early 2010s, if not earlier---long before Edge was a thing.
When they get a new computer, they install Chrome because they're already in that ecosystem: bookmarks, saved passwords, customization, Google accounts, familiarity. They won't suddenly use Edge because it has none of that.
Because when IE was utter garbage, Chrome had better performance, an ecosystem that included GMail, and also stored our passwords and bookmarks. Chrome also eventually allowed you to conduct google searches directly from the address bar. People use what they are comfortable with, and all the functionality built into Chrome by google is a HUGE sunk cost to bypass. The only person I know who uses Edge and Bing regularly does it to earn gift cards from Microsoft.
People forget just how good gmail was. It wasn't just a geek status thing, although getting into the beta certainly helped, it was more that every other option was absolutely inodiated with spam, and, worse still, most had very poor tooling available for managing email in general.
Back in the dark ages when I was using Yahoo, I was receiving plenty of email, and about 80% of it was spam, switched to gmail and never had that problem again.
It was, honestly, quite an undertaking to de-google myself, because I'd been at it so long.
Gmail's #1 selling point, as I remember it, was a much more generous amount of storage, for free. I think Hotmail had like 20MB of free email storage, Gmail had one gigabyte.
True, storage was also a thing, I remember using some hacked together GmailFS program, where you could split a large file among a bunch of email attachments that were sent to yourself and tagged, then you could download and reassemble those files anywhere.
I used it to store FLV music videos I found, it was... the okayest form of cloud storage.
I think it depends a lot on usage, I have a "real email" and consider my gmail address as "disposable", I use it to sign up for websites etc, whenever a form ask me to include an email address I will use my gmail address - the only time I ever log in to it is when I need to reset a password or similar.
Yes, that's a big one. Google searches are no longer anonymous now because people are mostly in a logged-in state on their browser thanks to Gmail or YouTube.
Google showed that providing an input field in which people can put their questions and then display ads next to the answers is one of the best business models ever. If not the best business model ever.
Google was free, open and without ads in the beginning. It is just too tempting to become the Google of the AI era to not try and replicate this story.
Microsoft is trying it too, but for some reason, they do not provide the simple, clean user interface which made Google successful. I always wondered, why they didn't do that with Bing search. And now with Bing copilot they chosen the same strange route of having a colorful and somewhat confusing interface.
Let's see how OpenAI does.