The big tech story of 2024 is the onslaught on Google’s search and digital advertising businesses by US regulators and a host of AI upstart competitors.
This has major implications for how we find things on the internet and also how we are shown advertisements for things online as credible alternatives to googling start to emerge.
Recently, I interviewed seasoned Sydney-based business journalist Paul McIntyre about the anti-trust lawsuits Google has faced in the US, including a court case brought by the Department of Justice which found that Google has an illegal monopoly in the search engine market.
McIntyre, an executive editor of media and advertising publication Mi3 and a Kiwi by birth, sat in on the latest anti-trust case against Google in Alexandria, Virginia, in September at which the US Government accused Google of stitching up the digital advertising market.
“This is not about whether Google worked,” he told me on The Business of Tech podcast. “The reality was the products were good. It’s what allowed them to… make their products untouchable by competitors that’s the issue here.”
So, what would happen if Google didn’t control the ad supply system like it does now? Would there be more innovation?
OpenAI’s new search experience
That’s a tantalising “what-if” but we’re now getting a glimpse of how researching on the web may look in future without Google’s search engine at the centre of the experience. For the past week, I’ve been conducting web searches using ChatGPT Search, the latest addition to ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot from US company OpenAI.
ChatGPT Search has been in pilot mode since July and I was only able to access it as a ChatGPT Plus member, which costs US$20 a month. A version of ChatGPT Search is also available to registered waitlist users.
“We’ll roll out to all free users over the coming months,” OpenAI indicated in a blog post.
How is ChatGPT Search different?
Because OpenAI has no background in search engines, it hasn’t any monopoly to protect. While Google has added AI Overviews to its search engines in the form of auto-generated blurbs at the top of some search results, it maintains the stock-standard collection of links, and ad-supported search results we’re used to, which generate hundreds of billions in revenue for Google.
Instead, ChatGPT Search gives you answers as explanations rather than a series of links. If you want to search further, you just keep entering text prompts and the AI will refine its answers. It’s a much more natural way to find information.
So what underpins ChatGPT Search?
According to OpenAI, “the search model is a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o, post-trained using novel synthetic data generation techniques, including distilling outputs from OpenAI o1-preview”.
That means that OpenAI’s latest and most powerful large language model, GPT-4o, has been fine-tuned to answer search queries and algorithms are used to structure responses into meaningful answers.
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“ChatGPT search leverages third-party search providers, as well as content provided directly by our partners, to provide the information users are looking for,” OpenAI adds.
That’s all well and good, but are the results better than what Google can deliver? If you want to take the effort out of searching, are willing to conduct a chat conversation to learn more, and value an advertising-free experience, the answer is yes, ChatGPT Search is, in many ways, a far better search experience.
Here are a few example searches I conducted. I wanted both Google and ChatGPT Search to outline the weather forecast for Wellington over the next 10 days.
Google gave me a series of links to weather forecasting websites, including Metservice, the go-to local source for weather information. ChatGPT Search instead drew on a similar set of websites, Metservice included, to display the information for me in the results.
Let’s try something a bit more complicated, such as the vexed state of US politics as the US presidential campaign was drawing to a close. I asked Google and ChatGPT Search to give me the latest polling info and what it suggested about who was likely to win the election.
Again, Google served up a series of links to credible news outlets running stories about the latest political polls. Instead, ChatGPT Search summarised the latest state of polling data, concluding that the election was a “near tie” and too tight to call.
ChatGPT Search includes sources for the key facts it serves up. Many of them are the same as Google draws on too. But there’s no clicking through to other websites to find the answers you are looking for - ChatGPT Search has a digestible summary available straight away.
How about a more straightforward holiday planning search, something millions of people do every day via Google? Here, I asked both Google and ChatGPT Search to give me the key attractions to visit on a trip to New Zealand.
This time, Google produced an AI overview summary, with a series of suggestions for attractions to visit. But that was soon followed by a collection of sponsored links to the tour company Viator. ChatGPT Search went for a more straightforward list of suggested attractions and photos to go with them.
The attractions themselves largely covered the same territory, with Milford Sound, Rotorua and Tongariro National Park in the top four results for both. I preferred ChatGPT Search’s approach, though the easy access to tour options Google served up meant I could quickly start delving into pricing and tour availability.
SearchGPT innovation to come
ChatGPT Search is launching with a focus on news, weather, stocks, maps and sports, so you’ll get real-time news results, weather forecasts and real-time stock prices. But its graphical interface isn’t as sophisticated as Google’s, particularly when it comes to mapping, shopping, travel and restaurant-related information. Google has put in the hard yards in these categories and has the ability to bring together its mapping, business listings and search products in one neat bundle.
SearchGPT is OpenAI’s prototype project to develop search-related features, so it will be rolling out new AI search-related features as its search business develops.
Google is faster serving up the links. ChatGPT Search was still populating a text-based answer 10-15 seconds after I entered a prompt in some cases. But after that, I had a coherent answer, complete with in-line citations and sources if I wanted to delve deeper.
ChatGPT Search is a clutter-free, simple and effective way to do research. It outstrips my current go-to AI assistant, Perplexity, when it comes to AI-powered internet searches.
But OpenAI knows how lucrative Google’s search advertising business is. It will be hard-pressed to resist the temptation to eventually include adverts in the search result summaries ChatGPT Search returns.
It needs to avoid the fate of Google, which is increasingly cluttered with advertising and favours in-house product offerings. Its usefulness has been reduced. As Google faces a US Government-ordered break-up, its real threat is actually coming from nimbler competitors, just as Google disrupted the search engine market 25 years ago.
