As we all know, one player dominates this lucrative market: Google, with a highly enviable 90%-plus market share. No one has been able to get anywhere close, with even mighty Microsoft’s Bing a light year behind at No. 2 with a 3.7% share.
Besides the acclaimed superiority of Google’s search algorithms and its effective use of AI, another big reason is network effects and the fact that Google has now become a verb. What you need, you ‘google.’
No wonder that every tech company on Earth is trying to get a piece of the action, but has so far only managed to gather crumbs left behind by Google. Despite onslaughts by Microsoft and Yahoo, and pretenders like DuckDuckGo and Wolfram Alpha, Google has never really been under any threat.
Until now, that is, with a new technology which threatens to upset its cosy world. The technology is Generative AI, and it is perhaps the first credible threat to Google’s throne.
This was apparent when ChatGPT was launched by OpenAI. Suddenly, we had another way of finding information and content out there, but a way that seemed more intuitive, warm and human than the cold ‘ten blue links’ of Google’s search results.
GenAI is built on language, much like we humans are, and its powerful Transformer algorithms (the ‘T’ in GPT) parse the vast troves of language on the internet to give us answers by probabilistically providing the next set of words to any word or prompt we give it.
This is how we humans learn and think with language, but it is this very human quality of making up stuff as it goes along—and being optimized for believability and not facts—that make Large Language Models (LLMs) of GenAI not very conducive to the factual precision we expect of search. Thus, while GenAI has been out there for a couple of years, it has not been a credible danger to Google’s search engine so far.
This hasn’t stopped people trying. Bing immediately incorporated OpenAI’s GPT4 into its search results and renamed it Copilot, a startup called Perplexity has made waves with its robust competition (see: bit.ly/3Sr9fKy), and even Google incorporated its own LLM Gemini into its search results.
However, the hallucinatory and probabilistic nature of GenAI often led to disastrous results, with Google’s GenAI-based search confidently making Barack Obama African, for example.
Last week saw the biggest onslaught on Google’s monopoly yet, the launch of SearchGPT by OpenAI. OpenAI seems to have learnt from the mistakes of others. It is being careful, releasing a prototype for 10,000 users so as to learn and improve results before a wider launch.
It has struck deals with content producers like Wall Street Journal, Vox Media and Associated Press, both to get quality content and send traffic back to publishers “by prominently citing and linking to them in searches.”
Publishers also have a way to “manage how they appear in OpenAI search features,” as per OpenAI. This partnership-led approach by the world’s hottest GenAI company is perhaps the most credible threat that Google has seen so far.
My view is slightly different, though: the biggest threat to Google Search is Google itself. The first reason is what Clayton Christensen called the “innovator’s dilemma.” The Transformer was invented at Google’s lab, but it was OpenAI that took it forward.
Google saw GenAI and LLMs as being too reputationally dangerous, and a direct threat to its lucrative advertising-led search business model. The risk of launching something that would cannibalize its own business was too great, and so it demurred—the classic innovator’s dilemma. Secondly, Google’s dominant position has made it complacent.
The Google interface is a bad user experience, with advertiser links disguised as actual results dominating its first page, although users want the best possible result rather than advertised results. Google is optimized for the advertiser, not the consumer.
The third reason is what usually happens to a wildly successful company with a monopoly grip: bloated structures slow down decision making, its leadership grows tentative and global regulators begin circling around and slowing down innovation.
Thus, while SearchGPT and Perplexity will launch frontal attacks on its search empire, the biggest threat to Google is Google itself.
#Faced #OpenAIs #SearchGPT #Google #resolve #dilemma
