Google is right to panic

It is a threat to the company’s search dominance for Bing to be the default search engine in ChatGPT

WThe new onramp to the resuscitated information superhighway is ChatGPT

hen Google discovered in March that Samsung, the world’s largest smartphone seller, was thinking of ditching its search engine for Microsoft’s Bing, there was “panic”.

Of course there was. According to The New York Times, which carried the report, “an estimated $3bn in annual revenue was at stake with the Samsung contract. An additional $20bn is tied to a similar Apple contract that will be up for renewal this year.”

Google’s parent, Alphabet, lost $57bn in value before Samsung decided this month not to make the change, reportedly because it would be too disruptive.

The matter represents a fascinating sea change in the once Googledominated search field, as the numbers reveal. Most people never change the factory-fitted settings, so what a smartphone maker sells usually remains.

That isn’t just for search, but for apps as well, which is why Google strong-arms smartphone makers into using its whole software suite. This starts with the Play Store (for apps, music, and video), its Search, Maps, Photos and Drive. It’s the way you capture users and keep them. It’s also anticompetitive — and many US agencies and European watchdogs are looking into how Google abuses its dominance.

Google has been swatting away these attempts to neuter its supremacy. But artificial intelligence (AI) services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which launched last November, are the biggest threat it has faced in its two decades as top dog, first in search and then in mobile operating systems through Android.

The company declared a “code red” in

December, but fluffed the launch in February of its own chatbot, called Bard. In a tweet about the James Webb space telescope, Bard incorrectly claimed it “took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system”. That cost Alphabet $100bn when its shares tanked.

Chatbots, or generative AI, offer a deep and meaningful threat to Google, which has inserted itself as the default way to find anything on the internet, though to use it, you have to be in a browser or a downloaded app.

Forget Google’s once spartan white page and lack of advertising that made the platform the home page of the internet. The new onramp to the resuscitated information superhighway is ChatGPT. And Microsoft owns it. More disturbingly for Google, ChatGPT announced this month that Bing will be its default search engine.

Microsoft has integrated ChatGPT into Bing and its SwiftKey keyboard app, making it easier to obtain access to generative AI. But more importantly, it allows you to search inside the app. If you can find what you need, with a little help from generative AI and without leaving the app that you’re in, you’ll complete whatever you’re doing quicker. Also, you don’t need Google.

And, as luck would have it, the most useful productivity tools — Microsoft’s Word, Excel, Teams, PowerPoint and Outlook — will have ChatGPT baked in as Copilot. Though yet to launch, this has received glowing reports and has been described as “game-changing”.

I haven’t used Google as a search engine for more than five years, using DuckDuckGo instead. Since ChatGPT premiered, I have been using Bing for all my searching. It is far superior. Google is right to panic.