Is Google irreplaceable? I don’t think so.

Google has been our primary source of information for so long that it is now a common verb meaning to look something up on the Internet (“ Google it “). But with the progress of AI technology, a new AI-driven search engine is gradually changing this pattern, and the search market that Google once occupied is being eroded.

Some people are optimistic about the state of Google like the authors of “Google’s market share of search hasn’t been disrupted by AI-Yet” in their article — Even though Microsoft’s search engine more than doubled its monthly active Bing users year over year, Google has long held the top spot in global market share and is rapidly planning to integrate artificial intelligence into its search service.

Is Google irreplaceable?

I don’t think so.

I do think Google may be replaced in the future.

Since the launch of ChatGPT late last year, the OpenAI product has been hailed as the future of search and a potential Google killer.

But the killer now has a fatal flaw: Reliability. Long after the introduction of new search AI, many people are still reluctant to abandon traditional search methods. The reason behind this is very simple: reliability. For many people, a Google search, albeit a bit cumbersome, will yield enough content to give their material a high degree of credibility. If you use AI search, even if only 5% of all the answers are hallucinations and errors, it is enough to make people flip over when making decisions and judgments.

In this case, does this mean that search AI has always been unable to shake the position of traditional search engines?

Not so, because the promise of a new technology sometimes lies not in how it performs on the old track, but in whether it can open up new tracks. In this era of information density, people have become increasingly dissatisfied with receiving raw information that has not been “chewed” and “digested.” People want not only information, and knowledge, but wisdom.

The first step for an AI search engine toward an intelligent assistant is to form its own “opinion” on the question. Only in this way can deeply processed information more effectively help people think and make decisions. This feature of “initiative” is the essential difference between chatgpt search engines and Google search engines.

A hypothesis I like:

While Google has been the colleague who points us to a book in a library that can answer our question, ChatGPT is the colleague who has already read every book in the library and can answer our question. In theory, anyway.

I think the most valuable and indispensable part of this book is its interpretation of a large number of obscure and difficult content. Sometimes, as long as the right prompt words are used, search AI can transform difficult parts of information into simple and understandable content, which undoubtedly greatly reduces the cost of personal cognition and understanding.

Perhaps in the future, search AI will summarize and provide ideas and insights when people read web pages.

If we look back, it wouldn’t have been obvious that Google would become a multi-trillion-dollar business. So in the future, open AI may not become the next search engine world.