They get basically everything they want (keeping it all in the tent), plus a negotiating position on search deals where they can refuse something because they can't do it now.
Quite why the judge is so concerned about the rise of AI factoring in here is beyond me. It's fundamentally an anticompetitive decision.
You might think "but ChatGPT isn't a search engine", and that's true. It can't handle all queries you might use a search engine for, e.g. if you want to find a particular website. But there are many many queries that it can handle. Here's just a few from my recent history:
* How do I load a shared library and call a function from it with VCS? [Kind of surprising it got the answer to this given how locked down the documentation is.]
* In a PAM config what do they keywords auth, account, password, session, and also required/sufficient mean?
* What do you call the thing that car roof bars attach to? The thing that goes front to back?
* How do I right-pad a string with spaces using printf?
These are all things I would have gone to Google for before, but ChatGPT gives a better overall experience now.
Yes, overall, because while it bullshits sometimes, it also cuts to the chase a lot more. And no ads for now! (Btw, someone gave me the hint to set its personality mode to "Robot", and that really helps make it less annoying!)
They tend to provide answers that are at least as correct as StackOverflow (i.e. not perfect but good enough to be useful in most cases), generally more specific (the first/only answer is the one I want, I don't have to find the right one first), and the examples are tailored to my use case to the point where even if I know the exact command/syntax, it's often easier to have one of the chatbots "refactor" it for me.
You still want to only use them when you can verify the answer and verifying won't take more time. I recently asked a bot to explain a rsync command line, then finding myself verifying the answers against the man page anyways (i.e. I could have used the manpage instead from the start) - and while the first half of the answer was spot on, the second contained complete hallucinations about what the arguments meant.
Raw data here if you want an update: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1882532/q...
It hasn't got better - down from a peak of 300k/month to under 10k/month.
They are both terrible in terms of correctness compared to duckduckgo->stackoverflow.
As an example deepsek makes stuff up if I as for what syscall to use for deleting directories. And it really misleads me in a convincing way. If I search then I end up in the man page and I can exentually figure it out after 2-3 minutes