Google has dominated the mega-search engine market with an iron fist for over a decade. Looking at the chart compiled by Statista, it is easy to reach two conclusions. The first is that the competition between Bing, Yandex, Yahoo, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, and Firefox is light years away. Second, the market share of each player barely changes from year to year. This industry seems to be a backwater, which is rare in the fast-paced technological world.
Google itself admitted a little over a year ago that the future of searches lies in generative AI. Among the options studied by the Menlo Park boss is a kind of panoramic view that artificial intelligence will offer to the Internet user when he goes looking for information (this is what Google already does by default, but it is understood that the sophistication goes up several steps).
It will also be possible, through Lens, to orchestrate searches based on a video capture. A new tool will create travel itineraries. And even the results will be presented and organized in a different way, so that if you visit a city for work, you will have options for leisure but also for holding meetings.
Although the European public is not yet aware of these initiatives, they do take note of the movement registered at the headquarters of OpenAI, the company run by Sam Altman, which has been on a very upward trajectory since the most popular iteration of ChatGPT was announced in November 2022, which in fact opened the AI market to the general public.
On July 25, the existence of SearchGPT was revealed, a prototype of a search engine that threatens to finally disrupt the monolithic landscape where Google operates and reigns. “Getting answers on the web usually requires a lot of effort and, often, several rounds of attempts to get relevant results. By improving the conversational capabilities of our language models with real-time information from the web, we will help people find what they are looking for much more quickly and easily,” explains the company.
For now, SearchGPT has been put in the hands of a small group of people with the idea of obtaining, as any company does before launching a product, opinions on what works and what fails. In any case, this engine will be integrated into ChatGPT, multiplying in the process the amount of data that is collected from the individual and further fueling the debate on the defense of privacy against the commercial interests of big tech.
Pulling the thread
Regardless of the outcome of this game, Google has another battle with Apple (which also has a niche search engine, Safari) in the smartphone sphere. In a few days, it will present its new line of phones, the Pixel 9, and this time it promises to take another step forward and transform these high-end devices into true AI powerhouses thanks to Gemini, with a special emphasis on photography. Apple is also expected to integrate its new algorithms more deeply than ever into the iPhone 16 family.
What is the goal?
The ultimate goal is outlined with astonishing precision by Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro in his novel Klara and the Sun. Every citizen has his own generative assistant, a kind of digital butler with encyclopedic knowledge capable of anticipating the owner’s desires and moods, prepared to educate the offspring, and willing to act as a professional co-pilot in the case of adults. With every technological revolution, someone strikes first. And this time, it is not clear who will get the upper hand or how transversal that reality will be.
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