Will a newbie chatbot dethrone Google as the world's favourite search tool?

Digital media’s latest sensation ChatGPT is touted as one of the most significant developments in the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) this year. Developed by OpenAI co-founded by Elon Musk and backed by Microsoft, ChatGPT has emerged as one of the most-used chatbots globally within a month of its launch.

The reason? It can answer general queries, explain codes and scientific concepts, write basic academic essays and even script for romcoms, much more than what Wikipedia or Google Search offer at present. 

The hype around ChatGPT has sparked a debate all over the world about whether it would replace Google as our go-to web search platform in the near future. 

While such speculations and suggestions appear to be far-fetched, ChatGPT and more evolved versions will surely pose a threat to Google Search business in the long run, tech experts say. 

Google’s search business model is based on paid links and links manipulated through search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) to appear above. 

Smart chatbots like ChatGPT have the potential to prevent many users from using Google Search and clicking on ad links, which generate almost ⅔ of Alphabet's overall revenue, some tech experts point out. 

Google itself is not downplaying the threat. CEO Sundar Pichai is believed to have issued a "code red", directing his staff to develop AI tools that can tackle threats posed by ChatGPT.  

e4m reached out to Google to understand their viewpoint and plans. The company’s response is awaited. 

How does ChatGPT work?

ChatGPT is a state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) model developed by OpenAI. It is a variant of the popular GPT-3 (Generative Pertained Transformer 3) model, which has been trained on a massive amount of text data to generate human-like responses to a given input.

Unlike traditional NLP models that rely on hand-crafted rules and manually labelled data, ChatGPT uses a neural network architecture and unsupervised learning to generate responses. This means that it can learn to generate responses without needing to be explicitly told what the correct response is, which makes it a powerful tool for handling a wide range of conversational tasks.

This makes it useful for tasks such as customer service, where a conversational model needs to be able to handle a wide range of questions and follow-up questions without losing track of the context.

Is the threat real? 

ChatGPT appears to be challenging the core of Google Search business, similar to how e-commerce platform search is a competition to Google search. Besides, it offers specific answers to questions posed, as opposed to Google search that gives link-based SEO algorithms, according to Paras Mehta, Business Head, Matterkind, an IPG Reprise company. 

“The entire ecosystem that Google has created to make its search work is being challenged. For example, the SEO workstream gets challenged, logic on how SEO as well as SEM works get challenged and so on”, Mehta points out. 

While Google Search offers only links based on certain algorithms, the multi-tasker ChatGPT is capable of language translation, text summarisation, and sentiment analysis. This makes it a versatile tool that can be used in a variety of applications.

Madhu Sudhan, the co-founder of Punt Partners, noted that Google had phrased their organizational North Star as “organizing the world’s information”. “The catch there was that the organization was manifested as a relevance-rank ordered list of links with the task of checking each link and finding the best one to address specific questions was still a manual task to be undertaken by the user,” he added. 

It's a strike at the heart of Google's core, says Sudhan adding, “ChatGPT skips those steps and suggests that what it shows you is the best and only (since it shows you one) answer. For very specific queries -- like code blocks etc. -- where people would find answers on stack overflow, ChatGPT has already ensured that you don’t need to go to Google and find the specific link.”

If there is a better alternative than Google Search that can offer a quick, detailed and precise answer, I would surely like to go for it, says Rahul Vengalil, Executive Director, Everest Solutions, a Rediffusion group company. 

Not easy to take on Google: Experts 

Chatbots are at the forefront of the current digital-first business environment as they make the customer journey more intelligent, informed, and convenient. Smart chatbots like x.ai (personal assistant that can schedule meetings, and send reminders), LivePerson (omnichannel messaging platform) and Lyrebird (creates realistic artificial voices) can do wonders for businesses, point out experts. 

However, competing with Google is not easy for these bots, including the current version of ChatGPT, many tech experts insist. 

Siddharth Bhansali, Founder of Noesis.Tech, CTO XP&DLand, Metaform, says that ChatGPT3 is still in its infancy. 

“It may take years for ChatGPT to scale up. Besides, we also don't know how it is going to be monetised. Ultimately the threat to Google is that ChatGPT3 is changing the way people find answers on the internet, and Google will have to step up to make the current way better or more relevant, or to innovate and disrupt themselves before somebody else (like ChatGPT3) will,” Bhansali said. 

Citing ChatGPT’s limitations, tech expert Jaspreet Bindra writes in an article, “For one, it does not crawl the web and so cannot go out there and find the information you need and tell you from where it is sourced. Secondly, its knowledge base, or the text it was trained on, ends in 2021. So, it may still think that Queen Elizabeth reigns over England, or that we’re still under the impression that Russia would never invade another country.”

ChatGPT has other drawbacks as well. Security company Check Point Research that chatbot gives hackers a way to easily design, write and execute malicious code. Besides, chatbots can generate wrong content, give responses that are racist or sexist and can be misused to create malware, tech experts say. 

A tech expert said, “Such flaws are the reasons why Google is hesitant to release its AI chatbot LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) to the public, on which it has been silently working on much before the launch of ChatGPT.”

For now, we should be happy that ChatGPT will improve our search experience ending its decades-long monopoly in the search. It has already given Pichai a food-for-thought or maybe his new year resolution.