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Search and Destroy: The Imminent Threat to Google's Existence
If reports are true, OpenAI will release its "Google-killer" search engine on Monday. How much will that change the game?
Search and Destroy:
The Imminent Threat to Google's Existence
If reports are true, OpenAI will release its "Google-killer" search engine on Monday. How much will that change the game?
by Tod Maffin (LinkedIn • social media)
Today's News
GOOGLE • Will Monday Be the Worst Day of Its Life?
Monday could be a pivotal day in the history of the Internet.
Google’s dominance as the defacto search engine for the world has been in place for decades now.
While competitors have arrived — Microsoft’s Bing, probably being the most notable — there hasn’t really been a challenger big enough to shake Google off its perch. Not a search engine, anyway.
Sure, AI is able to look stuff up on the web and give you a summary of what it finds. And sure, sometimes it even gets it right.
But AIs like ChatGPT have never been a search engine, in the true sense of the word.
Industry analysts have said if companies like OpenAI do manage to put an actual search engine together, that could have disastrous consequences to Google’s entire business model.
If reports are true, that’s what’s about to happen.
Is Monday the end of Google?
Reuters quotes two sources saying that OpenAI will announce the launch of its AI-powered search engine on Monday.
Both Bloomberg and The Information previously reported that OpenAI had been working on it.
Does Google understand the significance?
At a staff meeting recently, Google’s head of search told employees:
“People come to us because we are trusted. They may have a new gizmo out there that people like to play with but they still come to Google to verify what they see there because it is the trusted source…”
Uh… okay?
Sure, that was certainly the case in the earlier days of ChatGPT, but the engine is getting smarter, with fewer hallucinations.
And new models, like Meta’s challenger, are also jumping the industry forward.
To be fair, that executive also told his team: “It’s not like life is going to be hunky-dory, forever.”
OpenAI poaching Google search team members
Certainly not, especially when OpenAI has been actively hiring Google search engineers for months now.
Oh, and one more small kick in the teeth: OpenAI’s rumoured search engine launch Monday is scheduled one day before Google’s big I/O conference.
If OpenAI is planning to enter the search game on the eve of Google’s I/O event then it’s likely doing so to send a message — one that Google would do well to take seriously, given ChatGPT is one of (if not the) fastest-growing services the world has ever seen.
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