SearchGPT Will Not Kill Google Search. Here is Why I Know

Photo by Greg Bulla on Unsplash

The handbrake has been released. The starting gun fired. It’s the start of the Search Wars part II, and we all have a ringside seat.

This week OpenAI announced SearchGPT and represents their first attempt at an API-powered search engine.

As users, we have a future of better search. Summaries, visual answers and the ability to ask follow-up questions. It might be time for a better search experience, and OpenAI says that they are able to serve this to us.

The Panic

Google has been in panic mode about this for some time. They rushed out Gemini before they had a good name (calling it Bard for some time) and have panicked about salvaging their search ad revenue in this AI-powered future.

They’ve continued to have issues (glue on pizza wasn’t a good look) and now Google are seeing what is aimed at them in the near future. Visual answers might just be *the* thing that sets OpenAI’s solution apart, but right now we don’t know the true direction this might go in.

Google needn’t panic just yet.

Here’s why.

A Directionless Market?

We aren’t ready as consumers for a seismic shift in our search engines. 

We haven’t yet decided what we want search engines to do, or to be.

Current Search Engines

Legacy search engines fixed a date retrieval and sorting problem. 

They acted as an answer to badly organized data, and then presenting this data back to the user.

For all this time it’s worked well. People have been (relatively) happy with the results and have boosted Google to the number one spot in this area. It’s been a deserved position.

Current AI Solutions

If the future is using AI to provide summaries of TLDR data, what is the question? What is the problem we are solving?

I don’t remember anyone begging for a summary of data that might be good or bad and should be unquestioningly accepted.

I also don’t remember anyone asking for the data output to be massaged without the input being questioned.

The Future

Instead of searching (or summarizing) solutions for tech issues shouldn’t we be looking for a different solution using AI?

We could look at technology that has self-healing properties.

We could implement a self-populating shopping list derived from our tastes and nutritional needs, each night popping up a recipe using those leftover carrots.

That’s working on the data input, which hopefully would lead to less “hallucinations” and providing an answer to questions customers actually want.

Conclusion

Google is on high alert, but they should be looking further than OpenAI’s latest prototype. The game hasn’t yet changed enough to dethrone Google as the king of search, but that day just got much closer.