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Google has been failing to innovate for years. The last time they put out a useful innovation was Google Images, and every change they've made to it since its debut has made it worse. (Most recently hiding the link to images under a "more" button, dumbing down the "size" option years ago, and a handful of other things I can't recall at the moment.) Even the Russian search engine Yandex's image search is better than google images. The search pages are loaded with ads and irritating "helpful" information that just makes me spend more time trying to find what I want. Don't get me started on trying to find the names of songs by song lyric, the one thing a search engine should actually be good at 100% of the time...
I don't know if it's specifically "AI chatbots" that are going to threaten google but it seems like they've been stagnating for years so I'm sure some emerging technology is going to make them obsolete if they continue the same trajectory. I don't know why they're not incorporating AI into google images for example, the possibilities there are endless, it's like they're stuck in the 2010s while the rest of the internet has moved on
To be fair, I do like the features recently added to Google Image search: the ability to transcribe text from images, or to translate it into another language directly. They can be helpful in many cases (including, frivolous as it may be, quickly translating dialogue in Japanese fanart).
On the other hand, finding the original source of an image (a very common use case) now requires a few extra clicks, since Google Image prefers to "helpfully" offer you other images with similar content.
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