ChatGPT: a great search engine battle begins?

At the end of last year, ChatGPT made a lot of noise, and it continues shaking the internet communities and businesses. Being a powerful language model that can understand natural language queries, ChatGPT can make searching the internet more conversational, contextual, and user-friendly.

So many talks have already been about how the new OpenAI solution will change various areas from marketing and advertisement to education and content creation. But one of the spheres that ChatGPT affects the most is how people look for information. ChatGPT allows us to do it in a more natural Q&A way. It may disrupt conventional search engine businesses and create an opportunity for competition in the domain where Google has been the monopolist for the last 20 years. Those companies working with search technologies can’t miss such an opportunity.

Microsoft has already announced its plans to launch a version of Bing that would use ChatGPT to answer search queries. According to Tom Warren, The Verge, “Microsoft’s use of ChatGPT-like functionality could help Bing rival Google’s Knowledge Graph, a knowledge base that Google uses to serve up instant answers that are regularly updated from crawling the web and user feedback.”

Smaller businesses like Vectara or Neeva are also working on improving their solutions with the power of AI. “Technological moments like this create an opportunity for more competition,” Sridhar Ramaswamy, ex-vice president of advertising and commerce at Google and now CEO of Neeva, said to New York Times. You.com, a private search engine startup, has already added a ChatGPT-style chatbot on its website. And it took quite a bit for new open-source GPT extensions for Google and Firefox to appear.

Of course, at the moment, “ChatGPT is incredibly limited… it’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now. it’s a preview of progress,” OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman warned in his tweet. Still, it seems that the solution is reviving the domain a lot. And if things go in this direction, it may raise competition and lead to decentralization.

What do you think about ChatGPT and its ability to influence the way of searching for information?