According to the developer of Gmail, the most popular search engine on the Internet may face problems in the next one to two years.
Within that time frame, AI will eliminate the need for search engine results pages, where Google makes most of its money, and even if the search giant implements AI to catch up, it won’t be able to do so without destroying the most valuable part of its business, he predicted Paul Buchheit in a Twitter thread.
“The one thing few people remember is the pre-Internet business that Google killed: The Yellow Pages!” he wrote. “The Yellow Pages used to be a great business, but then Google got so good that everyone stopped using the Yellow Pages.”
“Artificial intelligence will do the same thing with web search,” he added.
As Buchheit sees it, the URL/browser search bar will be replaced by artificial intelligence that automatically completes a thought or question as you type it, and provides the best answer, which could be a link to a website or product.
The AI will use the old search engine to gather relevant information and links, which will then be summarized for the user, he continued.
“It’s like asking a professional human researcher to do the work, except the AI will do in an instant what would take a human many minutes,” he wrote.
Time for a change
Ben Kobren, head of communications and public policy at Neeva , an AI-powered search engine based in Washington, D.C., says online search is long overdue for an overhaul.
“If you look at search over the last 20 years, with a few exceptions, it’s been relatively flat,” he said.
“We’re used to a world of 10 blue links,” he explained. “You enter a query and on a good day you get 10 or so relatively useful links to websites that you need to search further to find the answer to your search or query. On a bad day, you get two pages of ads trying to get you to click and buy something and not answer your question until you scroll past the ad.”
“Either way,” he continued, “you’re not going to get smooth, one-stop answers that are simple, effective, and just what you’re looking for. The power of big language models and artificial intelligence is to make a transformational leap in how we interact with search engines and how we expect information to be returned to us.”
“We haven’t seen this kind of change in search in two decades,” he added.
How many crashes?
Artificial intelligence is disrupting current search models by giving consumers an easy way to find what they’re looking for, explained Noam Dorros, principal analyst at Gartner, a research and consulting firm based in Stamford, Connecticut.
“Instead of spending time sifting through different search results for a single answer on search engine results pages, AI gathers relevant information for the consumer, summarizing it in a detailed yet concise form,” Dorros said.
“Consumers’ attention spans continue to shrink due to the endless amount of information now available through various platforms, so any advancement in technology that satisfies the thirst for knowledge in a condensed form is clearly game-changing,” he added.
Rowan Curran, an analyst at Forrester Research, a national market research firm, pointed out some of the challenges of AI-powered search.
“Large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are not new to the online search market,” said Curran. “While Masters programs are fantastic for certain search tasks, there are many circumstances where getting a single answer is not the goal of an online search. For example, when searching for local restaurants, you can see a list with ratings instead of just getting a direct answer on where to eat.”
“Because of the retraining costs, it would be prohibitively expensive to keep LLM up-to-date with all the data collected from the Internet,” he added. “With further research and model distillation work, this cost is likely to decrease, but whether it will be sufficient to support live online search remains an open question.”
Advantages of market dominance
While artificial intelligence will certainly change search, how disruptive it will be remains to be seen, says Greg Sterling, co-founder of Near Media, a news, commentary and analysis website.
“AI responses are already integrated into Neeva,” he said. “There’s also Perplexity.ai and others pushing AI as an alternative to search. Bing will run content generated by artificial intelligence. But if everyone does it, including Google, it might not be so disruptive. Right now, the AI results are at the top of the results as a kind of big snippet.”
“Google is potentially vulnerable, but it would be unwise to bet against it,” Sterling added. “They have huge AI resources; they just roll them out slowly. AI content can affect ad clicks and Google’s revenue. This is a real problem for the company.”
Neeva A. I. search | Image courtesy of Neeva
Google has an advantage over its competitors on many levels, added Ross Rubin, principal analyst at Reticle Research, a consumer technology consulting firm in New York.
Search location gives Google an advantage over competitors, he explained. It is the default search engine for market leaders Chrome in the browser market and Android in the mobile phone market, and it has an agreement with Apple as the default search engine on that platform.
“Even if AI search engines create a better approach to finding information or meeting consumer needs than Google, Google will still have a dominant presence that will allow it to maintain its leadership,” Rubin said.
The moment of changing the platform
Kobren acknowledged that it would be a huge challenge to disrupt a hugely successful business like Google in two years.
“Clearly this is a moment of platform change,” he said. “For the first time, you’ll see a real shift in users adopting Google alternatives. You will see real competition in space for the first time. There will be some movement. How big will it be in two years? We cannot predict that.”
Liz Miller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, a technology research and consulting firm in Cupertino, California, added that it will be difficult to find an industry, segment or company that will not be disrupted by AI. in the next two to five years.
“The reality is that AI is seeing an accelerated path from the experimental lab to truly meaningful automation and intelligence applications that deliver business and personal value,” Miller said.
“My hope is that AI will once again make search relevant and user-contextual in real-time, instead of a three-horse race between user needs, publisher resources, and Google’s business model,” she said. “He has such potential.”
