For almost three decades, Google has been the most popular and trusted search engine for billions of people around the world. From learning how to make a pecan pie and diagnosing an illness, Google is usually the search engine of choice. Google’s success can be credited to its complex ranking algorithm, the PageRank, which considers a large number of factors, including relevance and popularity of web pages, when presenting search engine results to users.
However, with artificial intelligence on the rise, Google’s search engine monopoly may be slowly coming to an end. Enter OpenAI’s language generation model, ChatGPT. With capabilities ranging from natural language processing to text summarization, ChatGPT poses a unique tool that could give other search engines a way to compete with the giant.
Google has worked hard to develop the best search engine on the internet through years of research and development. While the current PageRank algorithm is effective, it isn’t without its drawbacks. ChatGPT, with its unique capabilities has potential to provide more accurate and well-informed search results that could be of more value for users. When used in conjunction with a search engine, ChatGPT could offer more sophisticated and interpretable results.
In addition to being a reliable source for results, Google’s search engine has integrated products, like Google Maps, Google Images, and YouTube, to provide users with a comprehensive search experience. This feature could make any competitor easier to compete against. OpenAI, on the other hand, has created ChatGPT and made it available for any type of use case, no matter the size of the company. While ChatGPT does have its own limitations, it has undeniably posed a threat to Google.
Jeff Dean, head of Google’s AI, has publicly acknowledged the potential threat of ChatGPT. Google is playing cautiously due to its “reputational risk” in providing wrong information. Therefore, they want to move slower with their machine learning model, LaMDA, in comparison to a small startup like OpenAI.
Compared to ChatGPT, the LaMDA algorithm is still in its infancy. It is missing many of the components that make Google’s search so powerful, such as its vast data, years of research and development. But, with more time and research, ChatGPT could replicate the same capabilities in the future.
When it comes to dominating the search engine market, Google is the clear leader. However, with the rising use of artificial intelligence and language generation models, there is a strong potential for an upset against Google’s infamous algorithm. Could ChatGPT be the future of search? The jury is still out. It will take some time before any kind of dominance shift may take place.
