Is ChatGPT really a threat to Google?

When ChatGPT launched and ignited the imaginations of millions about what Conversational AI could do - replacing Search with Conversation was one of the premiere use cases. To the point where Google has been claimed to be in Panic Mode and Microsoft is working to build ChatGPT into Bing. And YES, conversational AI will have a great impact on how we work - and mastering Generative AI will be a workplace skill just like mastering Search already is.

Remember when Search first hit the plateau of productivity? It was keyword based. You tried different keywords like "recipe green curry". The success of search engines was how likely they could turn those keywords into a link to a place that would give you the information you were looking for. Why Google became such a hit was because they had the best rating algorithm. Slowly and gradually people gravitated toward the search engine which was most likely to give you a helpful link at result 1... or at least first 10.

Search engines did not stop evolving. In fact, a class of search engines are called Insight Engines because they use Natural Language Understanding to try to decipher what the intention of the user is. Suddenly you could get better results with phases and questions. "How do I make Thai Green Curry?" will give you much better results.

The migration to questions also allowed search engines to supply information rather than links. So, as the first result, maybe you get an actual recipe for Thai Green Curry rather than a link to a recipe. This was a massive evolution because it kept people inside of the eco-system of the search engine. It was made possible by building massive knowledge graphs that connects information through relationships. Entities like people, places, recipes, movies, events, and thousands of other things is put in a massive graph with relationships between them. In may 2020, the Google Knowledge Graph was reported to have 500 Billion facts on 5 Billion entities. I googled that.

So what does ChatGPT bring to the table? Well... primarily it brings the contours of a vision for the next evolution of search. People use ChatGPT and they instinctly know that this would be very very useful. So far though, the imagination usually stops there. We get excited by ChatGPT for the answers it gives, but what we should be excited for is the questions we can ask.

Conversational AI brings two things to the table that is far beyond the realm of search and insight engines. It allows us to state our goal directly. "I once had this really creamy Thai Green Curry in a restaurant in Bangkok. Not watery like most recipes I see. I want to make something similar for my friend on friday. What do I need to do?". As a result you might get both a shopping list, a recipe, how long things takes, etc... But then you can start following up, "I'm really busy on Friday so I was hoping I could just put the ingredients in the slow cooker in the morning. How do I do that?". Of course, it may continue further, "what is a good side dish for this curry?", "can you recommend a wine pairing for it?", and so on.

This is what excites us with the impact of Conversational AI on Search. It's the ability to state your goal and get help to achieve it. In search, I keep my goal to myself and search for information I think I need to accomplish the goal. In conversational AI, I state my goal and through conversation is guided to completion. I really understand why Google is in panic mode here though, they should have seen this coming years ago and started to build it into their core search offering. But it's a failure of Product Management and not Research and Development.

It will be interesting to see how technologies like ChatGPT will be incorporated into Search. I am personally a little bit jaded for current search engines. The odds are that technologists will be leading the charge. Technology will be thought to speak for itself and solve all problems. But, I do think that successfully incorporating the ability to have conversations and state goals instead of questions - requires a Design mindset and deep understanding of users to successfully do. As talented as the UX teams are at both Google and Microsoft, I doubt that they will be leading the charge for this change. If it's product and engineering... then I'm deeply skeptical. In the end though, the answer to it all is YES, conversational AI is a great threat to search - because it will change what we expect and how we ask the search engine to help us.