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

That’s not how it works at large news orgs. Journalists will enter their articles in a CMS. From there it will get put into a workflow and seen by one or several editors who will edit things for clarity, grammar, style, etc. Links will get added at some point by an editor or automated system. There is no cabal of journalists scheming to keep links out of articles because “culture”.

It seems more malicious or intentional than only trying to gate keep. More often then not when I dig deeper into a news article referencing a scientific paper or study, the details they pull out are very much out of context and don't tell the same story as the research.

I have to assume the journalist writing such an article knows that they are misrepresenting the research to make a broader point they want to make.

What distinguishes journalists from storytellers?

If news on the web was journalism instead of attention seeking for ad revenue you’d be right.

Agree on the extension idea, except I’m not sure I want to see the original sensationalized content anyway. Might as well have the bot rewrite the piece in a dry style.

I think they're called broadsheets unless you're in the headline!

Would you mind naming or even… linking to a few such outlets?

Interesting example, as Google used to link to Wikipedia much more prominently, then stopped doing that, which dropped Wikipedia's visitor counts a lot. A very large percentage of Wikipedia's visits are Google referrals.

Google shifted views that used to go to Wikipedia first to their in-house knowledge graph (high percentages of which are just Wikipedia content), then to the AI produced snippets.

All to say, yes...Wikipedia's generosity with outbound links is part of the popularity. But they still get hit by this "engagement" mentality from their traffic sources.

Wikipedia eventually failed.

It's worse now with Instagram and other video apps that don't even let you link out. "link in bio" is killing the web.

The web works fine it's just PACER and stuff that is garbage because there is no competition in the trash people create for the government and public apathy (or corruption, take your pick) is high.

> significantly less confident that an LLM is going to be any good at putting a raw source like a court ruling PDF into context and adequately explain to readers why

You should play with LLMs this week.

Llms are already incredibly able to be great at contextualizing and explaining things. HNs is so allergic to AI, it's incredible. And leaving you behind

"Based on the court's memorandum opinion in the case of United States v. Google LLC, Google is required to adhere to a series of remedies aimed at curbing its monopolistic practices in the search and search advertising markets. These remedies address Google's distribution agreements, data sharing, and advertising practices.

Distribution Agreements

A central component of the remedies focuses on Google's distribution agreements to ensure they are not shutting out competitors:

No Exclusive Contracts Google is barred from entering into or maintaining exclusive contracts for the distribution of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, and the Gemini app.

No Tying Arrangements Google cannot condition the licensing of the Play Store or any other Google application on the preloading or placement of its other products like Search or Chrome.

Revenue Sharing Conditions The company is prohibited from conditioning revenue-sharing payments on the exclusive placement of its applications.

Partner Freedom Distribution partners are now free to simultaneously distribute competing general search engines (GSEs), browsers, or generative AI products.

Contract Duration Agreements with browser developers, OEMs, and wireless carriers for default placement of Google products are limited to a one-year term.

Data Sharing and Syndication

To address the competitive advantages Google gained through its exclusionary conduct, the court has ordered the following:

Search Data Access Google must provide "Qualified Competitors" with access to certain search index and user-interaction data to help them improve their services. This does not, however, include advertising data.

Syndication Services Google is required to offer search and search text ad syndication services to qualified competitors on ordinary commercial terms. This will enable smaller firms to provide high-quality search results and ads while they build out their own capabilities.

Advertising Transparency

To promote greater transparency in the search advertising market, the court has mandated that:

Public Disclosure Google must publicly disclose significant changes to its ad auction processes. This is intended to prevent Google from secretly adjusting its ad auctions to increase prices.

What Google is NOT Required to Do

The court also specified several remedies it would not impose:

No Divestiture Google is not required to sell off its Chrome browser or the Android operating system.

No Payment Ban Google can continue to make payments to distribution partners for the preloading or placement of its products. The court reasoned that a ban could harm these partners and consumers.

No Choice Screens The court will not force Google to present users with choice screens on its products or on Android devices, citing a desire to avoid dictating product design.

No Sharing of Granular Ad Data Google is not required to share detailed, query-level advertising data with advertisers.

A "Technical Committee" will be established to assist in implementing and enforcing the final judgment, which will be in effect for six years."

Frankly I don't think that's bad at all. This is from Gemini 2.5 pro

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they likely, and probably correctly, do not want you as a customer. people who are discerning and conscious like this generally use an adblocker, and even if you don't, are generally less easily influenced by adverts in the first place. most people like this tend towards wealthy, so it's a valuable demographic if they can get past those two issues, but they're not easy to get past

People like you are factored in. There just aren't enough of you for your preferences to impact editorial policy.

Most consumers cannot identify which website they are currently looking at. Google, Facebook, giveuscardinfozzzz.com, all the same. No distinguishing or discernible features or difference.

It has gotten absolutely out of control. I will be reading an article about a new game, and the article won't even have a link to the store page to buy the game...

It’s not about insecurity - it’s more like a user will accidentally click on the link, end up on the company’s site, not realise they’ve left the news site, be confused as to why the news site is trying so hard to sell them a dishwasher, not remember they were just reading an article about them, and will be scared and alienated.

Sure, but if they're hosting it on their own site then who's to know it hasn't been modified by them for some reason?

ie it's no longer a "source of truth"

It's true that they do this sort of thing for political reasons, but it sounds like the original NYT report wasn't meant to be merely a paraphrase of a specific UN report? In which case, it would be legitimate to cite other sources and report that they disagree?

The editorial board would probably prefer the NYTimes not get murdered by the current political climate - which of course is part of why the political climate is what it is.

Lol if you aren't blocking those popups by default. Lots of extensions will take care of that for ya.

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

Stack Overflow isn’t dead because of AI. It’s dead because they spent years ignoring user feedback and then doubled down by going after respected, unpaid contributors like Monica.

Would they have survived AI? Hard to say. But the truth is, they were already busy burning down their own community long before AI showed up.

When AI arrived I'd already been waiting for years for an alternative that didn’t aggressively shut down real-world questions (sometimes with hundreds of upvotes) just because they didn’t fit some rigid format.

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.

Is it common to use Internet search like that??? You're typing in literal questions to a search box rather than keywords, the name of the site you're looking for, or topics you want to read about. Maybe I'm just too old school, from the time where internet searches were essentially keyword searches, but it would have never occurred to me to type an actual english question as a full sentence into a search box.

If that's how most people use search engines these days, then I guess the transition into "type a prompt" will be smoother than I would have thought.

Google also has AI and has integrated it into search. It's not Google Search vs ChatGPT. It's Google Search + Gemini vs ChatGPT, where the Google option has a huge advantage of falling into people's already ingrained habits and requires no user education.

Google is the only serious competition to Nvidia right now. AI is both a threat to their core business and a core strength of their business. They invented transformers and a cheap inference chip. Their models are top-tier. I think google will be fine.

> AI is a competitor.

AI isn't competition for Google, AI is technology. Not only is Google using AI themselves, they are pretty damn near the top of the AI game.

It's also questionable how this is relevant for past crimes of Google. It's completely hypothetical speculation about the future. Could an AI company rise and dethrone classic Google? Yeah. Could Google themselves be the AI company that does it? Probably, especially when they can continue due abuse their monopoly across multiple fields.

There is also the issue that current AI companies are still just bleeding money, none of them have figured out how to make money.

>(Btw, someone gave me the hint to set its personality mode to "Robot", and that really helps make it less annoying!)

Kimi K2's output style is something like a mix of Cynic and Robot as seen here https://help.openai.com/en/articles/11899719-customizing-you... and I absolutely love it. I think more people should give it a try (kimi.com).

Is StackOverflow dead now? And because of AI?

It still usually has the standard quality of answers for most questions I google. I google fewer questions because modern languages have better documentation cultures.

Under good Monopoly law, you would remedy the situation that got them to this point, not worry about their future. Chrome + Deals got to them to this point so that's what you unwind. If it causes Google to get weakened and AI finishes them off, that's just creative destruction at work and oh well.

I'm Gen X and recently been using ChatGPT a hell of a lot more than Google, especially for queries similar to sibling comment. Instead of trying to word my query optimally for search, I just write what I'm trying to achieve in natural language and I get an answer, instead of having to scan a few results to know if they're likely candidates. Even with the made up shit on occasion this is a win.

>Google is bleeding so hard right now from Gen Z and especially Gen Alpha deciding to use ChatGPT

Is this an evidence based claim? From the Q2 2025 numbers Google saw double digit revenue growth YoY for search.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/23/google-expec...

Yeah, without Google's funding, Firefox could be in trouble, but I doubt it will be destroyed. And nobody is selling it. Or what 'only' browser are you talking about? xD

Destroying Chrome would be a net positive for the world. Also it is not even remotely the "only browser".

The entire world would be better off if it was destroyed. That is sort of the point. We have very unqualified people making decisions that force the entire Internet to comply because the monopoly says to. The Internet could hardly be in a worse place than it is now.

According to scotus they can just give the judge a thank you gift for doing such a good job.

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How humorous it may sound, but there’s no pressure or binding on Google to hire that judge :-)

There's an antitrust case ongoing right now involving Michael Jordan and NASCAR.

What's so mind boggling about this decision is that if there's one thing virtually all of America agrees upon, it's that Google needs to be reined in.

The Trump administration initiated this lawsuit. The Biden administration took it over and won the case. It's back on the Trump administration now and they wanted structural remedies.

The majority of Americans when polled express concerns about data privacy, security and monopoly in relation to Google - things Americans generally don't get that worked up about, but with Google, they know there's a problem.

Amit Mehta sold them all out with the most favorable outcome for Google that one could imagine. This guy, literally sold everyone in America out, the left, the right and the middle, except for Google management of course.

(This decision probably isn't even good for Google shareholders -- historically breakups of monopolies create shareholder value!)

I think Amit Mehta's impartiality here needs to be the subject of a Congressional investigation. I personally don't feel this guy should be a judge anymore after this.

If his decision stands this is going to be a landmark in American history, one of the points where historians look back and say "this is when American democracy really died and got replaced with a kleptocratic state." The will of everyone, people, the Congress, the Executive branch, all defied by one judge who sold out.

Same feeling for me as well. It was like the old Google where it lead you to the right answer. ChatGPT is similar but in some ways smoother because it's conversational. I think most days I don't even use Google at all.

That said their "Dive into AI" feature has cause me to use it more lately.

I'm losing braincells relying on Google Search shoving ad riddled trash in my face and even worse AI results. Gemini frequently just straight up lies to me. Saying the opposite of the truth so frequently I have experienced negative consequences in real life believing it.

The only people who are being homogenized or "down-graded" by Chat GPT are people who wouldn't have sought other sophisticated strategies in the first place, and those who understand that Chat GPT is a tool and understand how it works, and it's context, can utilize it efficiently with great positive effect.

Obviously Chat GPT is not perfect but it doesn't need to be perfect to be useful. For a search user, Google Search has not been effective for so long it's unbelievable people still use it. That is, if you believe search should be a helpful tool with utility and not a product made to generate maximum revenue at the cost of search experience.

Would you say that people were losing braincells using google in 2010 to look up an animal fact instead of going to a library and opening an encyclopedia?

Sure you could end up with occasional misinformation, but the speed at which you can get information more than makes up for it. Niche topics that would otherwise take hours or days to pull together and summar ise obscure sources takes minutes with LLMs.

Funny, I use LLM's for so much search now because they understand my query semantically, not just its syntax. Keyword matching fails completely for certain types of searching.

Tools like GPT-5 Thinking are actually pretty great at linking you to primary sources. It has become my go-to search tool because even though it is slower, the results are better. Especially for things like finding documentation.

I basically only use Google for "take me to this web page I already know exists" queries now, and maps.

it's not syntax, it's data driven (yes of course syntax contributes to that)

https://freedium.cfd/https://vinithavn.medium.com/from-multi...

At its core, attention operates through three fundamental components — queries, keys, and values — that work together with attention scores to create a flexible, context-aware vector representation.

    Query (Q): The query is a vector that represents the current token for which the model wants to compute attention.

    Key (K): Keys are vectors that represent the elements in the context against which the query is compared, to determine the relevance.

    Attention Scores: These are computed using Query and Key vectors to determine the amount of attention to be paid to each context token.

    Value (V): Values are the vectors that represent the actual contextual information. After calculating the attention scores using Query and Key vectors, these scores are applied against Value vectors to get the final context vector

Gemini 2.5 always provides a lot of references, without being prompted to do so.

ChatGPT 5 also does, especially with deep research.

That Searlesque syntax/semantics dichotomy isn't as clear cut as it once was. Yes, programs operate syntactically. But when semantics is assigned to particular syntactic structures, as it is with word embeddings, the computer is then able to operate on semantics through its facility with syntax. These old standard thought patterns need to be reconsidered in the age of LLMs.

Since when does google give your primary sources for simple queries? You have to wade through all the garbage. At least an LLM will give you the general path and provide sources.

ChatGPT gives you web citations from real time web searches.

ChatGPT provides sources for a lot of queries, particularly if you ask. I'm not defending it, but you can get what claim to want in an easier interface than Google.

Like others have noted, I think it's far from obvious that Google's LLM prompt is the best experience in the space, I would say it's clearly not in the top tier and even that relatively speaking, I consider it bad compared to the best options.

Assuming we're talking about the AI generated blurbs at the top of search results, there are loads of problems. For one they frequently don't load at all. For another search is an awkward place for them to be. I interact with search differently than with a chat interface where you're embedding a query in a kind of conversational context such that both your query and the answer are rich in contextual meaning. With search I'm typically more fact finding and in a fight against Google's page rank optimizations to try and break through to get my information I need. In a search context AI prompts don't benefit from context rich prompts and aren't able to give context-rich answers and kind of give generic background that isn't necessarily what I asked for. To really benefit from the search prompts I would have to be using the search bar in a prompt way, which would likely degrade the search results. And generally this hybrid interaction is not very natural or easy to optimize, and we all know nobody is asking for it, it's just bolted on to neutralize the temptation to leave search behind in favor of an LLM chat.

And though less important, material design as applied to Google web sites in the browser is not good design, it's ugly and the wrong way to have a prompt interaction. This is also the case for Gemini from a web browser. Meanwhile GPT and Claude are a bit more comfortable with information density and are better visual and interactive experiences because of it.

If Google went all-in on the AI overview and removed search results and invested more heavily in compute, it could be pretty good.

But as it stands, it's a terrible user experience. It's ugly, the page remains incredibly busy and distracting, and it is wrong far more often than ChatGPT (presumably because of inference cost at that scale).

It might be good enough to slow the bleeding and keep less demanding users on SERP, but it is not good enough to compete for new users.

What? The Google LLM assisted search experience is... not the best option by a long shot? It's laughably incorrect in many cases, and infuriatingly incorrect in the others. It forces itself into your queries above the fold without being asked, and then bullshits to you.

A recentish example, I was trying to remember which cities' buses were in Thessaloniki before they got a new batch recently. They used to rent from a company (Papadakis Bros) that would buy out of commission buses from other cities around the world and maintain the fleet. I could remember specifically that there were some BVG Busses from Berlin, and some Dutch buses, and was vaguely wondering if there were some also from Stockholm I couldn't remember.

So I searched on my iPad, which defaulted to Google (since clearly I hadn't got around to setting up a good search engine on it yet). And I get this result: https://i.imgur.com/pm512HU.jpeg

The LLM forced its way in there without me prompting (in e.g. Kagi, you opt in by ending the query with a question mark). It fundamentally misunderstands the question. It then treats me like an idiot for not understanding that Stockholm is a city in Sweden, and Thessaloniki a city in Greece. It uses its back linking functionality to help cite this great insight. And it takes up the entire page! There's not a single search result in view.

This is such a painful experience, it confirms my existing bias that since they introduced LLMs (and honestly for a couple years before that) that Google is no longer a good first place to go for information. It's more of a last resort.

Both ChatGPT and Claude have a free tier, and the ability to do searches. Here's what ChatGPT gave me: https://chatgpt.com/share/68b78eb7-d7b4-8006-81e0-ab2c548931...

A lot of casual users don't hit the free tier limits (and indeedI've not hit any limits on the free ChatGPT yet), and while they have their problems they're both far better than the Gemini powered summaries Google have been pumping out. My suggestion is that perhaps you haven't surveyed the market before suggesting that "by far the best LLM-assisted search experience today is available for free at the Google prompt".

Just like google cloud is the best ;)

I have seen way more hallucination from "AI overview" than ChatGPT.

You are biased, sure, but it seems that you haven't even used ChatGPT or other similar products enough to even attempt to give a fair assessment.

It basically rules out structural remedies, so what's left is pinky promises of not misbehaving again. Whatever these promises are, that closes the case for me.

Unless the remedy is that Google's online ads has to be spun out into a separate company away from their control, I don't see how any remedy can be effective.

What can honestly be done to punish them? I mean punish too, certain entities of Google should not exist.

Safari has been better for going on 5 years now, funny thing is it was worse for long enough that it seems everyone, even to this day, refuses to believe it.

Faster in basically every dimension. Supporting way more than FF in terms of specs. Way more efficient on battery. Better feeling scroll, better UI.

> Anecdotally, I've seen many geeks use Chrome rather than Firefox, at conferences etc.

Have you asked them why? I'd be willing to bet that it's because of vendor lock-in if you boil down to it. Lots of things only work on Chrome. Video calls are especially prevalent right now, but there's a bunch of bot detection shit that only works on Chrome too.

Whenever I use chrome, I'm missing the style editor and multi-line repl mode from firefox. When I switched to firefox from chrome, I didn't miss anything. There might be new features chrome has added since that I would want if I knew about them

You should try out Firefox’s if you haven’t. It’s pretty good now and I haven’t found something that I’ve been like damn wish it was there. Lighthouse testing I guess?

Firefox dev tools tell me why my requests and scripts fail because of CORS or blocked by a plugin or what have you. Chrome doesn’t remotely even provide that info.

I honestly have never seen a Chrome dev tools feature that was better or necessary for good web development that Firefox didn’t already have in the last 15 years. Yet I always see this bizarre sentiment of how the dev tools were better “just because”.

That's a fair criticism, but aren't you just talking about the http://www.msn.com/ default home page?

That's easy to change. The first time I opened Edge, I opened Settings, typed "home" into the settings search box, and changed the "Home button" setting to "New tab page", which gives a nice simple page with a search box, like Google.

Is there other advertising you've seen in Edge that is different from Google?

Microsoft is so frickking dumb they still haven't managed to grasp why the Google experience was better than the MSN/Bing experience.

This is natively supported in Chrome now: https://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+memory+saver

No doubt that Google using their mainpage as a megaphone for the first time in the company's history made a difference.

... but that only got people in the door. What kept them in the door was this image: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...

... or, rather, the word-changing technology underpinning that image: the ability to sandbox individual page rendering instances into subprocesses so that a failure on one page didn't crash the entire browser. I think people sometimes forget how fundamentally unstable browsers were in 2008, and how easy it was to trip over one bad page that would bring down your bank tab, your email tab, your document tab, the three tabs of source code you had open, the seven tabs of unread blogposts... Hugely disruptive. Just didn't happen in Chrome.

Firefox popularized tabs, Chrome let us have a hundred of them open.

I have quite opposite experience. I've never seen ads for Chrome but frequently see Apple (including Safari). And when I search for "chrome" or "browser" in Play Store, Firefox/DDG/Opera come before the true Google Chrome: https://imgur.com/a/LJiUX4m

I just don't think Mozilla have spare money to film a nice commercial...

That's an interesting observation. If they don't even use it for advertising, what _IS_ Mozilla doing with all those Google millions?

JK, we all know what they're doing with them...

Can I install the original uBlock in Chrome? No? It can't possibly be the best.

Except Google's offer is funded by their (court-ruled) advertising monopoly... which neither Bing nor all other competitors combined can compete with.

Who needs it marketplace when you have two trillion dollar companies to pick from. Am I right?

Or, perhaps, it should be nationalized. If it's such a critical piece of infrastructure that dissolving it would be unthinkable, but it also can't be competed with in the marketplace... It could be removed from the marketplace.

This isn't unheard of for communications technology. Postal service in England was exclusively a Crown privilege, then the monarchy realized there were benefits to the Empire if everyone could use the system, and that was such a good idea that when the US Constitution was written it asserted the government had to provide a postal service. There is past precedent for a government-oversight private enterprise in the US.

I personally would not like chrome, or some of these other things to exist on its own. Google operates some of these things mostly like a charity. Obviously there are serious incentives to have control but imagine what Chrome would be doing without Google… you think your privacy is at stake now? Some private equity companies were drooling over the idea of buying chrome a few weeks ago

I’m confused what deals the court would accept as non-exclusive then. Do they have to randomize the default search engines when you first boot a new iPhone?

How much could a slot that shows up at most twice per year for ~20s, for ~2% of web users, be worth, and where does that sit in the market? It sounds tiny, to me.

No? What makes you say that?

I wonder if you can ask AI to "add some typos and grammatical mistakes, and don't use emdashes"