Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts

This is an astonishing victory for Google, they must be very happy about it.

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.

Feels like judge was looking for any excuse not to apply harsh penalty and since Google brought up AI as competitor, the judge accepted it as acceptable excuse for very minor penalty.

AI is a competitor. You know how StackOverflow is dead because AI provided an alternative? That's happening in search too.

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!)

I don't agree that ChatGPT gives an overall better experience than Google, let alone an actual good search engine like Kagi. It's very rare that I need to ask something in plain English because I just don't know what the keywords are, so the one edge the LLM might have is moot. Meanwhile, because it bullshits a lot (not just sometimes, a lot), I can't trust anything it tells me. At least with a search engine I can figure out if a given site is reliable or not, with the LLM I have no idea.

People say all the time that LLMs are so much better for finding information, but to me it's completely at odds with my own user experience.