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GenAI continues to be a major disruptive force, reshaping how businesses innovate, make decisions, and engage with customers. Search engines are no exception to this wave of transformation.
According to Gartner, search engine volume will drop by 25% by 2026, losing market share to AI chatbots and virtual agents.
“Generative AI (GenAI) solutions are becoming substitute answer engines, replacing user queries that previously may have been executed in traditional search engines,” said Alan Antin, Vice President Analyst at Gartner. “This will force companies to rethink their marketing channels strategy as GenAI becomes more embedded across all aspects of the enterprise.”
In response to this decline, Google, the provider of the widely popular Google Search, is making a strategic shift by giving AI access to Search. The tech giant is integrating real-time search capabilities into its Gemini AI platform, a move that allows its language models to pull current information directly from Google Search.
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This new feature, called “Grounding with Google Search”, aims to improve the accuracy and relevance of model responses by allowing the model to connect with real-time and verifiable information from the web.
Developers building AI applications can use this new feature to integrate real-time data directly into their applications, enabling dynamic responses that reflect current events and trends. According to Google, this new feature uses a “dynamic retrieval” system that decides when to access search results based on query relevance, allowing efficient cost management and response times while ensuring accuracy.
Google’s move to integrate search with its AI platform comes only hours before rival OpenAI launched ChatGPT Search. AI models rely on datasets that they are trained on, and often struggle to use real-time information. With this new upgrade, ChatGPT users can query for real-time information, which, until now, has required a separate search engine.
Under the hood, the new “ChatGPT Search” is a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o, the company’s most powerful AI model yet. It is fueled in part by third-party search providers and content provided by news industry partners, which include The Associated Press, Vox Media, and News Corp. These partnerships could help address the persistent issue of AI systems using publishers’ content without permission.
According to OpenAI, the ChatGPT Search has been trained using synthetic data generated by an AI. A machine learning technique called model distillation was used to equip the customized GPT-4o model with knowledge from an earlier reasoning-optimized model called o1-preview.
ChatGPT will now automatically choose to search the web based on user queries. However, users have the flexibility to initiate searches manually by clicking a new web search icon, giving them control over when they want to pull in external information.
Commenting on the new feature, Sam Altman shared on X that the new search tool is his favorite feature since the launch of ChatGPT and that this release has doubled his usage over the past few weeks.
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By turning ChatGPT into a search engine, OpenAI aims directly at Google. The launch of ChatGPT Search also positions OpenAI as more of a competitor to Microsoft, which has invested $14 billion in OpenAI. OpenAI’s products are now competing directly with Microsoft’s Copilot and Bing. The concurrent launches indicate that AI-powered search could develop into a competitive three-way contest among Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.
The integration of AI with search engines promises to make finding information faster and more personalized for users, but it also brings up important concerns about accuracy, reliability, and lack of human perspective.
Users may encounter challenges distinguishing between reliable sources and potentially misleading content generated by AI systems. Additionally, there are also concerns that AI could be used to spam search results.
Google currently fields 90% of search traffic worldwide, but this dominance may soon be under threat. As AI integration continues to evolve the search experience, it is set to reshape how we find and connect with information, potentially transforming the competitive landscape.
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