In the last few years, Google has dominated the very rich search engine market with a disarming tranquility. In the current panorama of search engines, the Mountain View giant globally holds approximately 92% of the market share in 2024. A percentage that has not undergone particular fluctuations, in fact other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo have much smaller shares, with Bing fluctuating around 3% and Yahoo under 1%. These numbers reflect a consolidated user preference for Google that over the years, since 1998, has been able to introduce services such as Google Ads, Google Maps and Google News, which have further integrated search into users’ daily lives, making it increasingly personalized and localisedwith the search engine using location data and user behavior data to refine results.
However exactly Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, during an interview with Lex Fridman last month suggested that ChatGPT could represent the future of searchintegrating Large Language Models and research itself, stating:”If we can build a better search engine than Google, then we should,” but added that this would be an underestimate of what AI can actually be and could actually do.”Google shows you 13 ads and ten blue links, which is one way to find information, but what excites me is that perhaps there is a much better way to help people find and act on information.”
OpenAI’s launch of a ChatGPT-based search engine could represent a significant breakthrough. ChatGPT would seem to have all the numbers not only to make the search faster thanks to its natural language processing capacity but it could also offer users higher quality, more precise and contextualized information, enriched by images and detailed sources. After all, OpenAI has already demonstrated with ChatGPT that it can manage a very wide range of queries with surprising effectiveness, revolutionizing the way in which users interact with digital information.
The registration of the domain search.chatgpt.com, and rumors from multiple sources that even hypothesize a date for the launch of the OpenAI search engine of May 9th suggest an aggressive and well-planned strategy to position ChatGPT as a real alternative to Google.
The challenge to Google therefore seems to be much more than evident and could not only change user habits but also completely and perhaps completely rewrite the rules of digital marketing and online advertising in a completely new way. Google certainly won’t stand by and watch.
#ChatGPT #Google #era #search #engines
