How to Ditch Google Search
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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Thursday, April 3rd. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. Elon Musk has thrown out the rulebook again, this time not in the White House, but on Wall Street with a mega merger. Then, finding it harder to filter through Google's results these days, our tech columnist quit the world's leading search engine, Cold Turkey, and her results might surprise you.

First, it could be considered the biggest deal of the year, the tie-up between social media company X and artificial intelligence startup XAI. Except it's not your run-of-the-mill merger. That's because both companies are private and owned by billionaire tech titan Elon Musk, and the deal has broken all the normal rules.

WSJ Deals reporter Ben Glickman is helping break it all down. Ben, we'll get to the unorthodox nature of this in a second, but just start by telling us the reason for this merger. Well, there's already a lot of overlap between the two companies. They share GPUs like these chips that power AI processing. They already share some resources and obviously they are both trying to get a share of Musk's attention.

So there is some overlap and a rationale for why they would be working together.

So plenty of synergies, I suppose we could say. But this deal is raising lots of eyebrows for many, many reasons. And one is the valuation, which one professor told you is like using Monopoly money to buy Pokemon cards. Why is that? This is being structured as an all-stock deal. And the way that works is that both companies are basically trading in their shares for new shares in a combined holding company. But the negotiations over valuation and baselines

basically how many shares of the new company are based on negotiating an exchange rate between the two shares, essentially. So no cash is changing hands. And at the end of the day, no one really has a change in the value of what they hold. So the way that one person put it to me was that

Structurally, this deal would be exactly the same if they decided to value the company at $113 instead of $113 billion. And was there something also about how the valuation of X didn't actually change or it changed too much from when Elon Musk purchased?

purchased it? X had recently had a fundraising round that valued it at about $44 billion, including debt, which is the price that Elon paid. And this is basically consistent with that. The $33 billion price tag for X excludes their debt. So that's behind the X valuation. But the $80 billion valuation for XAI was a relatively big jump from

its last fundraising round, which was late last year, which was $50 billion. So 50 to 80, it's a

quite a leap. Another aspect of this is that usually with a deal like this, you've got lawyers and advisors on both sides. They're not the same people who are working on trying to hammer out this deal. In this case, it was the same people for both sides. It is not typical that they would have the same advisors on both sides. There's sort of a cliche about the dealmaking world, which is that it's very heated, competitive kind of

cutthroat world where both sides are really battling. Experts I spoke to did say that there is precedent for

companies using the same advisor on both sides of the transaction. But it's more likely to be in sort of small, already connected companies. But for a deal of this size, it is certainly unprecedented. I could not find another example of this being the case. That brings us to another oddity about this deal, which is that in a historical sense, mergers of this size are very rarely between private companies. And what does this say about

Elon Musk's standing with investors on Wall Street? It's a very positive sign for this certain cohort of kind of insider investors. This was private funding. So Musk had say over who was investing in XAI and in X when he made the deal. A lot of

known investors in one or both of these companies were cheering the deal, saying that this is a huge step forward for both of them, that this was a move that really made a lot of sense. So to a certain extent, it signals that there is a very dedicated part of the funding community

That is very much buying into Elon Musk. They're willing to back his ventures. They are not likely to be deterred by him doing some slightly unorthodox business dealings with two companies that he controls. That was WSJ Deals reporter Ben Glickman. Coming up, if you're tired of sifting through a bunch of search junk when you just want a simple answer, our tech columnist might have just the solution. We'll get the 411 after the break.

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If you want to know the score of last night's baseball game, the reason your back might be aching, or what foods dogs are allergic to, who or what do you ask? Your first go-to is probably Google, the platform that has dominated internet search for what feels like forever. But WSJ senior tech columnist Joanna Stern has become fed up with the overwhelming number of ads and sponsored links before getting any really relevant results. So she cut ties.

Joanna, quitting Google, I must say, seems very scary, especially given how much I rely on it in my personal life. Was it scary? You'll be okay. I'm telling you. Life can be as good if not better. That's quite a statement. I mean, how did you do it? What specifically did you eliminate and how did you replace Google? I think it's important to back up and

remind ourselves that Google's not a very good product. Google search. We all use Google in probably many other ways, email, calendar. But when you look at the search product and you just go and search and everyone can go and do that, go search for a product, go search for a question, you are just bombarded with a lot of crap. Sponsored links, SEO junk, lots of ads.

And so somewhere along the line, when Google grew to 90% search market, they just didn't have to care about the user experience. And finding an answer to a question became harder.

Using AI has helped me get to better sites and find answers quicker and go to the sites that have the depth and the information that I need. So which platforms did you replace Google with and how did you find interacting with them? Was it easier than Google? I'm a big ChatGPT user. I also use Anthropix Cloud. Cloud just added web integration. Perplexity was a really big one. I actually found Perplexity to be one of the best ways to get

real-time web information. I also tried Microsoft Copilot. I also tried Google's new AI mode in search. I tested a lot of these. One of the things I feel like I rely most on Google for is Maps. So how did you replace Maps?

There are some places where it is very clear AI is better. And then there are places where you still will want to go to Google. And one of them is for finding local search or maps or even local information about hours to restaurants or hours to stores or retailers. So those are some places that Google is better. Another place that I think Google is certainly better is if you know that website you want to go to, but you don't remember the exact URL.

Google is still the quickest way to get to the things you know you need to get to on the internet. But if you don't know the answer, that's where AI really can speed up the process and be very helpful. When we talk about AI, we think about the hallucination issue as a really big problem. That's when AI just makes stuff up and it's just not true. Was accuracy a concern for you as you set out on this Google-less adventure?

It was. And there are certainly times you get wrong answers. But if you know you need something that's really accurate or you really want the details, the question is, am I missing any reliable sources? And that is a real big question and concern I have about these tools, right? The more we get an answer from AI and then we rely on, oh, where was the citation? Or we even don't even go to the citation. Then what happens to the publishers, places like us, like the Wall Street Journal?

People aren't clicking through. People aren't getting that vetted information. And I also knocked these AI companies for making those citations so small. Like, I'm not going to click that tiny little link. It's really important to click those links and the AI company should make them bigger. And did you get

any comment from any of these AI companies or from Google on this adventure you embarked on? I spoke to Robbie Stein, who's Google's vice president of product for search. And first, I asked him why Google has so many AI options, because I think that people can get lost. So there's AI overviews, which shows up at the top of some search results. Then they've got the Gemini chatbot. Then they have a new AI mode, which is not available to everyone yet, but I really do think is the future of Google search.

And so we talked a lot about AI mode and some of the early findings that Google's finding from both AI overviews and AI mode, because I was really focused on this question, what if people stop clicking? And he assured me that Google really does find it important to get people to the open web. That is what Google is built on. That's what these AI tools are built on. He also really did back up what I have been saying, which is you go to the Google list of links, you click one, you go, oh, that's not it. You hit the back button.

You go to another one. Nope. Go to the back button. He argues, and I actually saw this in my own experience, that you're going to sites that are going to be more meaningful, that are going to have that deeper information, and you spend more time there. When you talk about this AI mode, since you've had an opportunity to use it on Google, does that give you the same kind of experience that you liked on Google?

platforms like ChatGPT. I'll describe this AI mode for people. Basically, you go to google.com and if you've been given special access to this AI mode, which eventually they'll start rolling out to more,

alongside the usual tabs at the top, like images or news, you'll see this AI mode. And so you go to that and it is more of a chatbot feel. And so you could ask questions. The example that I had in my story was a 3D printer under $500 that's good for kids. It gave me back a list of a couple of printers. It gave me a bulleted list of the top features of each of those, gave me some links on the side. And then within line of the actual suggestions, the first one was a toy box 3D printer.

It had links to where I could go to find more information about those. It is much cleaner. It is much quicker to get to an answer that these are the three top 3D printers and you can now go find more information about it versus Google search, which is like a wall of just pictures and information. And you're just like, what? I don't know. Like, I'm going to click around here for 40 minutes and maybe find an answer. This is why I think this is the future of Google search and search in general.

That was WSJ senior tech columnist Joanna Stern. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Jess Jupiter and Julie Chang with supervising producer Emily Martosi. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

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