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BD Insider: Can SearchGPT compete with Google?

Can OpenAI dethrone Google from its top spot in the search market? Will integrating AI into search be sufficient to end Google's decades-long dominance?

🍔 Quick Bite: Last Thursday, OpenAI unveiled its AI-powered search engine, SearchGPT, designed to challenge Google Search by offering a different approach to retrieving information using AI.

This raises the question: Can OpenAI dethrone Google from its top spot in the search market? Will integrating AI into search be sufficient to end Google's decades-long dominance?

🧠 The Breakdown

Google has dominated the search space for decades and shows no signs of slowing down. Just last week, the company reported earning $85 billion in Q2 2024, with Search alone contributing $48.5 billion. However, a growing perception is that Google is more vulnerable than ever. With companies like Perplexity.ai and now OpenAI introducing alternatives to Google Search, these new products could pose real competition for Google. Last Thursday, OpenAI announced SearchGPT, a product it still clearly refers to as a prototype to rival Google Search. This new prototype aims to organise and make sense of search results using real-time web access, with plans to eventually integrate it into ChatGPT. Unlike Google, which returns a plain list of links, SearchGPT responds to user queries in a conversational tone, providing organised summaries and relevant links. It also features visual answers, which include AI-generated videos and images. In an example from OpenAI, the search engine summarises its findings on music festivals and then presents short descriptions of the events followed by an attribution link. You can also ask follow-up questions or click the sidebar to open other relevant links.

Source: OpenAI

OpenAI says SearchGPT will be powered by the GPT-4 family of models (its most advanced AI model) and will initially be accessible to 10,000 test users to refine its capabilities before a wider release. This limited rollout allows OpenAI to address potential inaccuracies and gather feedback.

How would SearchGPT be able to provide real-time information?

When OpenAI released ChatGPT, one of its drawbacks was its inability to provide up-to-date information. Although the company has fixed this, the challenge regarding search engines is different. When you search on Google, you expect the most recent and relevant information for your queries. For SearchGPT to have any chance of displacing Google, it must provide accurate and current information at the very least.

OpenAI aims to provide this by collaborating with major news publications like The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, and Vox Media. Earlier this year, the company signed content licensing agreements with multiple companies, including Vox Media, The Atlantic, News Corp, and the Financial Times. These licensing agreements are important for OpenAI, considering that one of its rivals, Perplexity.ai, has been accused by publications like Forbes and WIRED of ripping off its original reporting and providing it as answers to search queries without appropriate attribution.

OpenAI emphasised that publishers would be prominently cited and linked to in searches. “Responses have clear, in-line, named attribution and links so users know where information is coming from and can quickly engage with even more results in a sidebar with source links,” said OpenAI in its announcement blog post. It also added that publishers could control how they appear in the search results. They can opt out of having their content used to train OpenAI’s models and still be surfaced in search.

Who are the other players in this AI race?

SearchGPT is not in shortage of competitors in this space, including direct AI competition from Google itself. The search engine giant launched AI overviews for users in the US during the Google I/O event in May. The search feature provides users with AI-generated answers to certain queries, and these answers appear above all other search results. Soon after the launch, Google started to receive backlash for some of the responses users received. One of its responses said Geologists recommend humans eat one rock per day, while another response suggested smoking while pregnant is healthy.

Source: @nickblack on X

Google said some of the screenshots of responses that spread were fake and attributed some of these responses to a number of factors, including “web stress” and the limited ability to interpret nonsensical queries and satirical content. However, this has not stopped users from asking to block AI overviews from their search results, although there’s an option to dismiss the results.

Perplexity, which offers an AI search product that it calls an “answer engine,” has also been accused of ripping off content and plagiarising articles. Google’s age-long competitor has also recently previewed Bing generative search, a tool that aggregates information around the web and generates summaries in response to search queries using AI. Since Bing already uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 model. So it’s difficult to see how SearchGPT can significantly outperform Bing's search capabilities.

Source: Bing

Another AI-powered search engine, Genspark, has been accused of providing ethically questionable search results. In a particular response, it recommended weapons that could be used to kill someone.

Would SearchGPT overcome all these pitfalls to leapfrog Google?

It’s still early days for SearchGPT, but given the setbacks observed with similar products, it’s clear that OpenAI will need to continue refining SearchGPT to compete effectively with Google’s traditional search engine.

Objectively speaking, the odds are currently not in OpenAI’s favour. For one, there will always be the concern of responses being 100% accurate. A recent article by The Atlantic highlighted an inconsistency in OpenAI's demonstration video, where SearchGPT provided incorrect information about the duration of a festival. If there are doubts about the accuracy of the search results, it raises the question: why would a user choose SearchGPT over Google if they have to fact-check every response anyway?

Another concern is the necessity of infusing AI into search. If traditional search engines have been functioning well without large language models for so long, what benefits would AI bring to the search process?

Publishers and creators are also concerned that de-emphasising webpage links could reduce site traffic. A recent study showed that AI overviews could negatively affect about 25% of publisher traffic.

SearchGPT and its competitors must address all these concerns to stand a chance of competing with Google. To topple Google, SearchGPT would need to overcome several hurdles, including gaining widespread adoption, ensuring robust data privacy measures, and maintaining unbiased search results. Moreover, Google's advancements in AI and continuous evolution mean that any contender must consistently innovate to stay ahead.

Where’s Africa in all of this?

In Africa, Google dominates the search engine market with a 96.8% share. Any change to the search engine terrain would impact Africa heavily. With AI adoption steadily increasing across Africa, the question remains whether any African AI startup can position itself to compete effectively if one of the major players significantly disrupts the search engine market and blows the AI search race wide open.

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