AI&Us: AI Search

Before the world came to be dominated by Google, there was Yahoo. And before we had Yahoo, there were several other pioneering search engines that laid the groundwork for the modern internet.?

These early innovators were fascinating in their own right.

AltaVista (1995) was known for its advanced search capabilities. It was revolutionary with its use of the Vector Space Model and the Hub-Authority Model to rank pages. It was also one of the first search engines to support natural language queries, allowing users to search in a more intuitive way. Despite its early success, AltaVista struggled with management changes and a lack of focus, and eventually lost ground to more adaptable competitors like Google.

Inktomi (1996) was a major player behind the scenes. It powered search for companies like MSN and its technology was so advanced that at one point, it had a market cap of $25 billion. However, Inktomi’s inability to control user experience and adapt to emerging trends like user-generated content and speed eventually led to its decline. It was later acquired by Yahoo for $240 million.

Excite (1995) was one of the first search engines to offer more than just keyword-based search. It introduced a powerful indexing system and provided a user-friendly interface that quickly gained popularity. At its peak, Excite was acquired for a staggering $6.5 billion by Home Networks, only to go bankrupt two years later.?

In startup lore, from which I love mining personal reflections, the history that could have been is always fascinating.?

Larry Page approached Excite and offered to sell Google for $1 million and 1% equity. Excite CEO George Bell passed on the opportunity. According to Bell, Larry said, “If we come to work for Excite, you need to rip out all the Excite technology and replace it with Google’s search.”?

The deal fell apart.?

Bell was running a successful company, a small startup founder with less than 6 employees had the gumption to tell him what to do??

As history shows, Larry Page was absolutely correct. Excite should have thrown out its search engine and installed Google. It would be audacious to do so. And most founders of successful startups, business CEOs would have too much ego to see merits in others and flaws in their own technology.

Despite their initial success, early search engines eventually fell by the wayside, Google outpaced them all with its innovative PageRank algorithm and a relentless focus on user experience — something that it has maintained to this day, even as the 4th largest company in the world by market cap.

I’ve seen the rise and fall of enough pioneers to know that the core tech landscape is ever-changing.?

Dominance in one era never guarantees future success and with AI leading the frontier, a similar race may be unfolding once again.?

For a lot of search oriented use-cases, many have embraced ChatGPT with open arms — drafting emails, writing college essays, composing LinkedIn posts (though not this one), and more.

But, one tool that has caught my attention is @Perplexity.ai

ChatGPT has been built grounds-up to mimic human conversation and to be a versatile foundational LLM — excelling in tasks from acing competitive exams to solving complex math problems, creating documents, and even interpreting images.

Perplexity.ai , however, was designed with a singular focus: to be an extraordinary AI-powered search engine. It transcends traditional keyword-based search (something even Google is now exploring) by understanding the true meaning and context of your queries. It doesn’t just answer your question, it anticipates your needs, offers follow-up prompts that are more precise and relevant to search/research.

The images below show the search results I got to ‘How many unicorns will India have by 2030’?

Of course, the nature of the query heavily influences the outcome, but in my view, Perplexity.ai is currently setting the pace because it is designed to be utilized in real-time information retrieval use-cases. Instead of serving up links, Perplexity aggregates information from credible sources into a single, cohesive answer.

I believe it’s still very early days and the race is just beginning, with the stakes higher than ever.?

But, what’s sure is that our search experience is going to enhance even further. Whether Google will remain a domain search engine is yet to be proven.?

For the first time, AI allows for newer companies to emerge with core differentiation to search.

It’s great to see an Indian founder is in the race to the next search frontier! ( Aravind Srinivas )

Jayraj Bharat Patel Kalaari Capital

?#AI #Innovation #Technology #SearchEngines #PerplexityAI #ChatGPT