AI-augmented web search is at our fingertips already

livemint.com:

I asked the following question of my Google search bar and a few AI-based search engines: “Should I write a column on AI based search?" Google’s search engine answered the question with its usual list of internet links, led by a link to “AI based literature review tools" and including an article titled, ‘How do you know a human wrote this.’ Microsoft’s Copilot, embedded in the Bing search engine, came back with an emphatic “certainly." Both Copilot and Perplexity.ai, a new search engine that I like, returned responses that laid out the advantages of AI-based search and concluded with some limitations. Perplexity began by asking me about the purpose of writing the column: education, opinion or news.

Armed with the “opinion" nature of the column, it went on to suggest that the main purpose of such an exercise was to discuss the benefits and challenges of implementing AI-based search. It also helpfully suggested that AI-based search can help optimize long-tail search results by providing more relevant results for less common queries.

Many moons ago, Google revolutionized search with its unique ‘page rank’ algorithm. The cleanliness of its landing page and the general quality of its algorithms used to display relevant links on the internet made Google the world’s de facto web-search monopoly.

In its early days, Google toyed with the idea of a subscription fee for a certain number of searches, but quickly pivoted to an advertising-based revenue model. With that switch, the ‘clean’ page-rank output got mixed with sponsored links, and with each click, its users were unwittingly losing a bit of their soul to Google.