Mint Primer | The search for an engine: Should Google worry?
Google became one of the world’s largest companies by building the world’s most popular internet search engine. But the advent of AI has spawned an army of rivals ready to upstage its monopoly. Now, with OpenAI showcasing SearchGPT, should Google be scared? Not really.
Microsoft’s Bing—incidentally powered by OpenAI’s generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) foundational AI models—has already showcased the practical uses of a generative AI-driven search and browsing experience. SearchGPT remains within that ambit, but seeks to improve it by ensuring that the AI search algorithm remembers queries for follow-ups. As a result, SearchGPT has so far been advertised as an early-stage experiment to see how generative AI might be fitted into commercial search products.
This would be key to see how the future of search can be monetized by Big Tech. Well before SearchGPT, Google had unveiled a Search Generative Experience as an internal test product. And in May, it expanded the scope of new features on AI-powered search that uses its latest AI model—Gemini.
The essence of Google’s AI-powered search experience is the same as that of SearchGPT. However, the key difference is that while Google has dominated the search space so far, competitors with similar interfaces and algorithmic prowess could out-muscle Google in an industry that it monopolizes globally. To be sure, neither Google’s nor OpenAI’s new search platform is openly available yet.
Bing is perhaps the best known among Google and OpenAI competitors. Another is the startup Perplexity AI, backed by Nvidia and Jeff Bezos, among others. Smaller, independent competitors include privacy-centred browser Brave’s AI search feature, You.com’s AI search, Komo, Phind and Waldo.
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