For Creatives, Strategists & Marketers

Search is becoming interesting again.?

On Monday Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google (and its parent company, Alphabet), published a?blog?announcing that the company is integrating AI technology into its search engine.?

The blogpost was primarily about Google’s new chatbot, Bard, which it hopes will rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But further down, Pichai wrote that Google was working to bring the language model that powers Bard (as well as other AI technologies) into its existing products, ‘starting with Search’.?

The announcement follows talk that Microsoft is working to incorporate ChatGPT into Bing (talk that may be?confirmed?by the time this newsletter reaches you).?

Since it was launched at the end of November, ChatGPT has amassed more than 100 million users,?according?to data firm Similarweb. It has also encouraged people to think about a new way to navigate the internet.?

Rather than answer queries with a list of relevant links, an AI-powered search engine could give a single, definitive and eloquent, response. There’s almost certainly demand for such a tool: we recently?wrote?about how people are using new platforms, like Reddit and TikTok, to find information after growing frustrated with Google.?

It’s not a straightforward task, though. Chatbots like ChatGPT are built on closed datasets that are not updated with new information, which makes them useful for answering only certain kinds of questions. But according to the?Financial Times, a host of tech companies and startups are working to overcome that hurdle by perfecting a technique referred to as ‘retrieval augmented generation’, which involves letting a natural language model read and synthesise information from the open web.

If this is the future of search then it means upheaval for advertisers. Single, coherent answers are great for users but afford fewer opportunities for ad placements. Of course, that’s largely the point – ad clutter is part of the reason people are getting fed up with Google.?

Another, more intractable, problem might be that AI search engines disrupt the dynamic of the internet. A lot of people publish information online because doing so means they are more likely to show up in search engine results. If search engines no longer send users to the sources of information, where is the incentive to provide it? Content marketing would die a death.?

No doubt Google is ahead of us on thinking about all this. And maybe it will end up ahead of its rivals in the race to integrate AI into search, too. But for the first time in a long time, search feels like a category that's in flux

We?published?the 2023 Contagious Pioneers list celebrating the best agencies on the planet last week – and now that you know the ‘who’, it’s time to dig into the ‘how’.?

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Photo by Nathana Rebou?as on Unsplash