The promise of smart search is both dazzling and daunting. Google's search business generated $175 billion in 2023, which is a lot of money by any standards. However, unless they make some radical changes, they are doomed. First of all, it is an appalling, time-wasting experience. The first five or six returns are usually ads and the links it does return aren't that great because of SEO having its finger on the scale. But most of all it is ugly. Who needs all that visual pollution in their lives?
I haven't used Google for a serious search for over 18 months now. A search on any of the main LLMs, with a properly framed query, gets me to exactly where I want to be, no ads, no clutter, no irrelevance. Once they have a basic grasp of how to write a prompt, why would any sane person ever bother with Google again? It doesn't make sense. The irony is that one of the original things that made Google attractive to use was that the search page was free of clutter, unlike AltaVista and the other services around at the time.
Tools like ChatGPT and Claude are remarkably capable of searching the web and distilling data into tailored summaries. They are reshaping how we navigate the retrieval of information. This experience, which is superior in every way, is eclipsing what traditional search engines can do. They can offer instant insights in formats like charts or bullet points as well as a web address or link. Of course, there are always the issues of biases and hallucinations, but they tend to be a problem in content creation rather than just plain search.
Most people with experience and sense have learned by now that with AI anything beyond a simple request for information has to be verified. But at this current stage of development, AI's speed and flexibility, particularly the latter, are winning out.
What is Google going to do? Along with Meta it has an incredibly rich amount of data on any given individual who uses the internet on a regular basis. One would hope that they would use this information in a considerate and secure manner in order to tailor the experiences of their users in an appropriate manner with little or no intrusion. But what I have seen they seem to be adding shiny new digital knobs on to their systems without changing the underlying fundamental structure.
Maybe the executives at Google need to pay attention to Joseph Schumpeter when he pointed out in 1942 that “This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.”
While the onus, as always, is on the user to be very careful of what they share, over time there is really no defence against the all-pervasive data gathering machinery of the gargantuan corporate entities that we have come to know but definitely not love.
AI’s smart search is a powerful tool, and while its immense oceans of data may lack soul, it isn't cluttering your workflow with totally unnecessary rubbish for the moment anyway.
Background Reading:
Alphabet Inc. Form 10-K
Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism & Democracy