The Future of Search in 2023: Will Google Be Replaced?

You better believe it! ChatGPT, Bing’s latest chatbot-integrated browser, and all other similar models are trained on language models, which means they have digested an immense amount of knowledge on most topics and can provide you with the most concise results. The accuracy of these results is still a question mark and it does not provide the latest results like google, but it’s making the news. Right now, there is no technology more popular than Chatgpt in 2023.

How ChatGPT is disrupting the search engine market

Now, the market these bots are trying to tap into is the search engine market. Search engines historically provided you with a bunch of results matching your query, ranked in a way that you could sort out for yourself. But the advent of OpenAI ChatGPT truly changed the game. ChatGPT was just an experiment, like many other experiments by OpenAI. Nobody had expected it to explode in popularity as it did.

Why is ChatGPT so popular?

Traditionally, people would be presented with a lot of results at their disposal, and in the choice-making process, it would take more time than actually reading what the article or that particular website or result has to say. In today’s fast-paced world, most people don’t have that time. This is where ChatGPT, Bing, and all other cheaper copies of the chatbot model come into play. They consume a lot of information and, in turn, provide you with curated and concise information that is free from the paradox of choice. You simply read what’s presented and accept it. Everyone goes home happy. We aren’t going to get into the complexities of flaws in this model – at least for now.

Is Google missing out on the chatbot race?

Now, the godfather of this entire search engine and chatbot space is indeed Google, with a massive market share and multi-billion dollar profit each year. It’s always been easy money for Google, but this time, Google failed to understand the problem of the masses. People don’t care anymore if the information they need is coming from a Ph.D. scholar or a Twitter enthusiast. They need digestible information, which Google failed to deliver. Google clearly didn’t understand its user requirements despite spending millions of dollars each year studying consumer behavior, and now it must pay the price.

How costly would this mistake be to Google?

Who has been the market leader and has had a virtual monopoly over this search engine space? Google already lost nearly 100 billion dollars in stock value due to its presentation blunder, and in the future, if people completely switch to chatbots, how would Google place websites that pay more at the top? All of these questions remain unanswered as of now, and they aren’t even important to us consumers. The point which stands now is “has Google lost the chatbot war?” It is definitely too early to state that.

Knowledge vaults and Google Bard

For a company like Google, which has amassed the world’s finest tech minds under one roof, developing a superior AI-powered bot or any other product is not a big deal. As a matter of fact, they have been working on the language model idea since 2014. They developed Knowledge Vault, which had consumed way more information than Bing or ChatGPT ever would, and seeing this massive threat, they introduced Google Bard.

Very similar to ChatGPT, it can also respond to various queries and requests in a conversational manner, and it is equipped with current data, giving it an upper hand over ChatGPT. And not just the timing, but the relevancy of the data is also enhanced in this bot. Currently, it hasn’t been released for the general public, so we don’t know the specific details of the exciting features Bard would be carrying. But for now, we can say that hat a paradigm shift is going to take place and it definitely looks like traditional search engines would be replaced and would go obsolete.

How would chatbots change the search engine market and its methods?

If the traditional search is gone most web browsers would lose money since advertiser is not a dummy to pay for Ads no one would click on, it’s very much clear that in front of curated results, people would never click on traditional webpages, and even if they do they won’t click on these boosted ads. We might see Siri and Alexa-like models integrated into web browsers soon to take the conversational experience one step forward.

When we asked Chatgpt about the future of chatbots and traditional search and how it would benefit the consumer, it humbly replied : 

Chatbots can help search engines understand the intent behind a search query more accurately, leading to more relevant search results. For example, instead of just searching for “best restaurants in New York,” a chatbot-powered search engine can have a conversation with the user to understand their specific preferences and requirements, such as their preferred cuisine or budget, and then provide personalized recommendations.

Conclusion

The conclusion of the passage is that a paradigm shift is taking place in the search engine industry, and it looks like traditional search engines will eventually become obsolete. The rise of chatbots, and the development of AI-powered language models such as Google Bard, are making search more conversational and personalized, providing users with more relevant results. This shift may have significant implications for web browsers and advertisers, who will need to adapt to the changing landscape.