Tiago Bianchi
Research expert covering internet & gaming in Latin America and Spain
Get in touch with us nowWhat is AI-powered online search?
Largely based on language processing models, AI-powered search engines are conversational generative AIs that employ deep learning techniques, combined with users’ inputs and growing datasets, to provide search results in the form of a dialogue. Despite having slightly different ways of presenting results, the overall revolutionary aspect of new AI-powered search tools is turning the online forage for information into a chat, more interactive than a classic search result staple.Consumer interest in AI-powered search products opened a verge of possibilities of employing AI much beyond simple online search usage. Companies are already using the AI-powered badge to offer search solutions for education, workplace, financial operations, and, of course, exploring the possibility of ad insertions into its search results.
Who are the leading AI-powered search companies?
Despite the long-running monopoly of Google’s search engine and competition of Microsoft's Bing in the global online search market, it was the San-Francisco based start-up OpenAI that became the spearhead of this gold rush by releasing ChatGPT in late November 2022. With a remarkable ability to simulate a human conversation and sophisticated answers, the chatbot managed to reach more than a million users in only five days, and 100 million two months after its release, becoming the fastest-growing consumer application in history . At the beginning of 2023, Microsoft announced a multi-billion investment in its company and launched a new version of its search engine, powered and programmed to work like the chatbot inside its own platform.Hearing the starting gun, Google rushed to release Bard, its own experimental conversational service based on its Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) AI program in February 2023, and also recently announcing the development of an all-new search engine under the working name Magi along several other AI tools. Other online search giants also released their own versions of search chatbots, like Chinese giant Baidu, with its national version Wenxin Yiyan, and ERNIE Bot, in English. South Korean Naver announced its SearchGPT for queries in Korean, while Yandex announced its YaLM 2.0 – all expected for the first half of 2023.
Meanwhile, several other startups started gathering heavy investments for working on solutions for this blooming trend: co-founded by a former Google executive , NeevaAi managed to raise 77.5 million U.S. dollars, while You.com received 25 million U.S. dollars in funding during the summer of 2022. Perplexity AI raised even more for its and its iOS app, while crypto-focused Kaito gathered 5.3 million U.S. dollars in February 2023.
Challenges, high bets, and mistrust
The overall adoption of AI and the undeniable impact of ChatGPT raised the bar for almost every possible product, especially those related to online search. While Google already sees its search traffic share slipping away, the release of plugins that allows the chatbot to interact with external data and services might even pose competition to platforms outside the online search scope, like app stores and even the iPhone.The risks for companies are already palpable: seemingly run-over in the AI-powered race, factual errors performed by Bard during its release caused Google to lose around 100 billion U.S. dollars in market value, despite other tools also committing similar inaccuracies. Additionally, this new digital environment also raises questions and risks commonly associated with technology, from informational conflicts, and risking millions of dollars in research investment, to how these tools can diminish online traffic and even drive the end of ad revenues.
What do customers think about AI-powered search?
Not unaffected by the new technological gold rush, potential users are interested in online search products based on AI but have mixed feelings of curiosity and wariness. Across all age groups, the main worries are regarding the ability of AI-powered search tools to provide unbiased and truthful results, proving that the mistakes committed by these tools did not go unnoticed.Before even thinking about switching to an AI-powered search, customers wish for safe and easy search engines that can be integrated with their already established digital environment, while less than half of them are looking for engines that use AI to improve results. With the race at full speed, users demands show that chatbots should focus on delivering the best-curated information to their audiences in a responsible manner – the primary function of why people use search engines in the first place.
