The rise of AI-powered ChatGPT has been incredible. Since launching in late 2022, the conversational chat engine powered by GPT-3 has provided amazing results to the point where people are pitching it as the biggest-ever challenge to Google’s search business.
When you ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT a question, you get the answer, if you don’t like the answer, you follow up with another request and the answer improves. This is a significantly better experience than having your google search query responded to with a series of links, the first of which are paid ads.
From the search results page, the user experience is then essentially a roll-the-dice experience, clicking links, hoping that will get you to the answer. Often you don’t find what you need, so you back out and try another link, and repeat this process until you get what you could have got in the first place, the actual answer to your question.
Google’s search algorithm does attempt to surface the sites that have content that has the best chance at giving you the answer, but compared to ChatGPT offering the actual answer (currency aside), the difference between the two is vast.
Recently we learned that Microsoft has made a significant investment, to the tune of $10 Billion in OpenAI and we’re expecting that their search engine Bing, will integrate ChatGPT, presenting a major issue for Google.
Google still has a massive opportunity to fight back.
The engineering talent at Google is amazing and their biggest trump card is their browser penetration with Chrome on the desktop and on billions of Android devices.
If Google built a similar AI-powered answer engine and integrated it into the search bar, it would be one step less than opening a browser and navigating to https://chat.openai.com/chat.
If Microsoft really wanted to play hardball, they’d integrate this AI-powered search into the start menu and provide access to their multi-billion userbase of consumers, but here’s the kicker, they could offer businesses a technique to integrate on-prem data sources and get localised, secure responses from corporate documents and data.
Personally, I’m glad the search game has ignited again, as the consumers will ultimately win from this AI-powered innovation.
