AltaVista. Lycos. yahoo. Once upon a time, these were the most popular search engines in the world. Then came Google. It made the search better.
Since 2002, Google has been the search engine, and its dominance has only grown year after year. It has risen to monopoly status and 91.6% of the global search market share in February, by StatCounter. And many “Google killers” have come and gone in the past 20 years.
Ten years ago, Google’s Eric Schmidt (former CEO and Executive Chairman) said that a Google killer was inevitable:
“But the most important thing is that someone, somewhere in a garage, is shooting at us. I know, because we were in that garage not long ago. Change comes from where you least expect it. . . Next Google it won’t do what Google does, just as Google didn’t do what AOL did. Inventions are always dynamic, and the resulting disruptions should give us confidence that the future won’t be static.”
Could OpenAI’s ChatGPT be that unexpected change?
Why we care OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seems to think it would be “cool” to figure out how to integrate LLMs and search, essentially changing the way people search and think about it. Of course, Google is still in an extremely strong position and is looking to launch an experience similar to the Search Generative Experience.
Here’s what Altman had to say about Google, search, LLM and more in an interview with Lex Fridman, published this week.
A better way. Altman began by essentially calling the current Google search experience “boring.” He doesn’t want to copy Google’s model; seems to want to reinvent search (to be specific: the way people find information) as we’ve known it for over 20 years:
“…if the question is can we build a better search engine than Google or whatever, then sure, we should go, people should use the best product, but I think that would greatly underestimate what it can be. Google shows you 10 blue links, well, 13 ads and then 10 blue links, and that’s one way to find information. But what I’m excited about is not that we can create a better copy of Google Search, but that maybe there’s a much better way to help people find and act on and synthesize information.In fact, I think ChatGPT is that for some use cases, and we hope to make it that way for many more use cases “. “But I don’t think it’s as interesting to say, ‘How can we do a better job of giving you 10 ranked web pages to look at than what Google does?'” Maybe it’s more interesting to say, “How do we help you get the answer or the information you need? How do we help create it in some cases, synthesize it in others, or indicate it in others?” But a lot of people have tried to make a better search engine than Google and it’s a hard technical problem, it’s a hard branding problem, it’s a hard ecosystem problem. I don’t think the world needs another Google copy.”
Again, remember the Schmidt quote I shared earlier: No one will ever seriously challenge or beat Google by emulating Google Search. Just ask Microsoft (sorry, Bing).
Duane ForresterVP, Industry Insights at Yext, believes we’re seeing a major shift in the traditional search model right now:
“Why fight Google on search? Why not just offer ad-free search? You’re already paying a subscription to use ChatGPT, so ad-free search is included. An easy way to get the whole paradigm: just change that paradigm.”
LLM + Search. What would be cooler? ChatGPT’s integration with search, according to Altman.
As Altman said in the interview:
“…We are interested in how to do it right. That would be an example of something cool.” “I don’t think anyone has figured out the code yet. I would love to go do it. I think that would be great.”
There have been rumors that ChatGPT is developing a web search product. As I said at the time, I’m skeptical that ChatGPT can compete with Google in traditional search, but what Altman is talking about in this interview is not a new version of Google. It’s something different.
Open AI doesn’t want to do what Google does. But it is clear that Altman believes that OpenAI is not yet at a point where they can do LLM + Search at a high enough level, but is clearly showing interest in getting there.
On a side note, ChatGPT hit a new US traffic high (1.6 billion hits) in February, according to SimilarWeb.
Altman hates commercials. Once upon a time, Google was loved for its minimal advertising experience. This is clearly no longer the case according to Altman:
“I hate ads just as an aesthetic choice. I think ads had to come to the Internet for a bunch of reasons, to get it going, but it’s a momentary industry. The world is richer now. I like that the people pay for ChatGPT and know that the responses they get are not influenced by advertisers.I’m sure there’s an ad block that makes sense for LLMs, and I’m sure there’s a way to participate in the transaction flow of ‘an unbiased way that’s fine to do, but it’s also easy to think of dystopian visions of the future where you ask ChatGPT something and it says, “Oh, you should think about buying this product,” or “You should think about going here on vacation’ or whatever’. “And I don’t know, we have a very simple business model and I like it, and I know I’m not the product. I know I’m paying and that’s how the business model works. And when I use Twitter or Facebook or Google or any other great but great product with advertising, I don’t love that, and I think it gets worse, not better, in an AI world.”
Altman said he believes OpenAI has a big business that can pay for its computational needs, without resorting to ads:
“… it seems like there should be a lot more leaps forward in advertising that doesn’t interfere with the consumption of content and doesn’t interfere in a big, fundamental way, which is like what you were saying, like it’s manipulating the truth to fit to advertisers”.
But. This is all hypothetical at this point. And how Brett TabkePubcon CEO noted, Google still has a major advantage over OpenAI: It’s a treasure trove of data:
“Take books. It’s estimated that Google has digitized around 40 million books, which is an incredible resource for training large language models, and OpenAI doesn’t have access to anything on this scale.” “Then there’s Maps. As we delve into the world of visual language models, Google’s StreetView collection of billions of photos is a gold mine. Sure, OpenAI could get its hands on satellite imagery like Google does, but Google’s collection is something really special that no one else seems to have.” “YouTube: When it comes to training a new model of video AI, Google holds all the cards.” “Android: Google knows everything there is to know about phone usage.” “Chrome: Like click data, you bet your browser is using this data to the search It must also freak them out seeing the massive engagement numbers on ChatGPT.” “Gmail: They know everything there is to know about email usage, email trends, email content, everything email . There must be important data coming out of Gmail that can be used to train an AI model.”
The interview The interview is embedded below. Transcript here.
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