Online search to make up lost time with artificial intelligence
SAN Francisco, USA—Online search, dominated by Google for 25 years, has become as banal as making a phone call, but it could finally be getting a profound reset thanks to artificial intelligence.
The classic search and click made ubiquitous by the Google behemoth is getting a major AI makeover as bots ChatGPT, Bard or Bing see hundreds of millions of web surfers seek answers to life’s questions in a new way.
“People are realizing how many times they use Google search, not to find a webpage, but to answer a question,” said Stefan Sigg, Chief Product Officer at Germany-based SoftwareAG.
Microsoft, long considered big tech’s boring uncle, has jumped fearlessly and some say blindly into generative AI search with an update to Bing, the long-struggling also-ran to Google.
Bing’s bot, which was released worldwide after three months of testing, responds directly to a query instead of throwing out a pageful of links for the search user to wade and click through.
With a prompt, Bing will compare two products, brainstorm vacation plans or reassuringly help prepare a job interview, for example.
‘Heavy lifting’
“Now, search does the heavy lifting for you,” said Cathy Edwards, VP Engineering at Google, during the company’s annual I/O developers conference in California.
The user no longer has to “sift through the information and then piece things together,” she said. At the conference, matching Bing, Google presented the latest iteration of its web search juggernaut, but instead of the constellation of links that confronts you today, a chatbot offered a few paragraphs to answer what you were looking for.
Google’s AI-amped search engine will slowly be released in the United States as a start, the company said.
“What we’re trying to do is make it more natural and intuitive, as easy as asking a friend and getting information from someone who’s really knowledgeable for any question you have in the world,” Elizabeth Reid, Vice President of Search, told AFP.
Beyond search, Google and Microsoft have deployed generative AI tools to other products, from cloud to word processing, presenting bots as helpful “co-pilots,” to use the term hammered home by the Windows-maker.
Personal ‘genie’
“I think search is going to be fractured into a million pieces, and integrated into all sorts of interfaces, and not just one monolithic centralized place, which is what Google has become,” said John Battelle, author and media entrepreneur.