The search engine: chronicle of a death foretold
Gartner has recently predicted that the use of internet search engines will fall by around 25% by 2026 as they are replaced by chatbots and other virtual agents powered by generative algorithms, a trend that will change online marketing as we know it.
This is hardly a surprising conclusion: since the explosive growth in the use generative algorithms following the release of ChatGPT at the end of November 2022, we have seen how our information needs can be better met by a well-formulated prompt rather than foraging through traditional search engines.
The trend, which I have been able to corroborate by testing my students on a classroom laptop, makes a lot of sense: while a search generally directs us to a set of links or, in some cases, to some questions that try to provide more or less direct answers, the result of a question to a generative algorithm is, overnight, much simpler to manage. There is, of course, a certain element of novelty appeal in this, while at the same time, a complex relationship of trust has been established that to some extent has replaced critical thinking, as had previously happened with search engines themselves. At the beginning of this century, the first result of a Google search seemed to many people to be some kind of absolute truth; now, many unquestioningly accept a well-written ChatGPT answer, despite…
