AI Is Coming for Google’s Crown—Is Traditional Search Dead?

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Transcript:

[00:00:04] Doug McIntyre: So Lee, there’s a lot of nervousness about Google. There’s the headline nervousness, which is the, yeah, there is problems with the justice department, right? And there, there, there’s talk about spinning out Chrome. Chrome has three quarters of the browser. Market share in the world. Yep. So in essence, Chrome is it’s a Trojan horse.

[00:00:25] Doug McIntyre: You’ve got Chrome, it means that Google’s your default search engine. They also pay, I think, Mozilla and Apple to have it be the default search engine. Yeah. Those guys, yeah, they were, and

[00:00:36] Lee Jackson: that’s one of the things that’s part of these lawsuits against them.

[00:00:40] Doug McIntyre: So, so number one, they may be on the ropes with regulators.

[00:00:43] Doug McIntyre: They’ve lost the case, but to me, number two is, is that search. Has been a great business for them for 20 years. I mean, they’ve been the search business, they have 90% of global search right now. The only places they don’t have search complete dominance are China and Russia. right. And now what you’ve got is you’ve got the AI guys coming in and saying, you don’t need search.

[00:01:09] Doug McIntyre: Nope. If you’ve got, if you’ve basically on your smartphone, if you’ve got one of the features. It is a better way to get information. Now, there is a case to be made that that’s true. One of the things that’s great about AI is you can continue to query it. Okay? Right. Ask something if it’s not immediately what you want.

[00:01:33] Doug McIntyre: You can add to the search. Right, exactly. Ask it. Ask it. Ask it. It has the ability to basically hone in on things. That search doesn’t work that way. No. Now Google has a brand and they’ve got habits. They’ve got people who have habits. But if you take the amount of money that’s being thrown at AI apps right now, you talk about guys who can go in and start to buy market share.

[00:01:56] Doug McIntyre: Yeah. It’s these guys who, have valuations, are in the hundreds of millions of dollars to the tens of millions, billions of dollars. So I am worried if I’m a Google shareholder in Alphabet. That OpenAI is coming after me. That Elon Musk with XAI is coming back. Yeah. There’s a zillion of them.

[00:02:19] Doug McIntyre: Well, there’s a couple of these companies that are just in the business of trying to replace Google. Yeah. Their, their primary business is not AI writ large. It’s can we replace Google as the default way that people search the internet? When you’re up against guys with huge amounts of money, if you’re in the AI business, you just walk into a VC’s office and say, I’m in the AI business and I’ve got two PhDs over here.

[00:02:46] Doug McIntyre: One’s a rocket scientist. Then it’s that easy. They write you a check on the spot. I don’t like being in a business where there are a huge number of people who’ve got money to throw at a problem. Yeah. That’s the business that Google’s in, so. I think Alphabet. I have a theory about breakups, like AT&T (NYSE: T | T Price Prediction). I think if you break up Google, Alphabet, the pieces may be worth more than the whole.

[00:03:13] Lee Jackson: Oh, absolutely. We’ve had this discussion for, more than once that, that when they broke up, telephone back in the day, back in the eighties, all, all of the spinoffs ended up being just huge bargains.

[00:03:26] Doug McIntyre: They ended up being, but Google and Alphabet, I think is now an exception to that rule. If you spin this stuff out, Google ends up being the largest of the standalone companies if they spin stuff out.

[00:03:38] Doug McIntyre: The reason people use Google is now under siege by AI. Exactly. So I think if you break it up, I’m a seller of Google, I may be a keeper of Chrome and Waymo and whatever else they spin out, but I’m, I think Google’s in trouble. They may not be in trouble next year, but they’re in trouble in the next five years because AI is a better search function Yep.

[00:04:05] Doug McIntyre: Than traditional search.

[00:04:06] Lee Jackson: Yep. It’s faster and it’s easily accessible and you don’t. have to count on one company and yeah, AI will ultimately replace the search engine as we know it, because ostensibly is just a search engine, but it’s, it’s a thousand, 10,000 million times faster, and as you said, you can continue your search by, by queries to the, to the AI program.

[00:04:30] Lee Jackson: And it’s incredibly useful.

[00:04:32] Doug McIntyre: Listen, I use it, you’re not allowed to use AI to write stories, right. Bad practice. Right? But if I’m doing a research, if I’m doing research for a 24 7 Wall Street story and I want to know the 10 cars that pro pollute the most, right? Most greenhouse gas emissions, ’cause I wanna do a story on Ford and see if their cars are, one of their cars is on the list.

[00:04:56] Doug McIntyre: I make that query, I have the answer to that back within five seconds.

[00:05:00] Lee Jackson: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And we started doing here recently, our work is being checked via AI. And it’s not because the head editors don’t trust anybody. Why they’re helping to make sure that the data we put out to readers is, is right on the money. Everybody’s gonna use that, you use it for creativity, but you do use it for editing and help. And it’s, it’s a time saver. It’s a huge time saver.

[00:05:26] Doug McIntyre: So if they break up Alphabet, I may be a holder of a bunch of the pieces, but I would dump Google. When it’s spun out it’s at a good price point, I would get out because it’s under siege.

[00:05:38] Lee Jackson: Yeah. And, and again, its main qualities will, be busted apart. There’s almost no question about it.