Google’s current search presentation might seem to be very high-tech and current and not something that is going to become obsolete. Still, I would argue that it is going to change soon, particularly in the way it monetizes search through sponsored advertising.
For the past two decades, Google has dominated the online search industry and has figured out how to make a lot of money by connecting this with online advertising. Its presentation is basically a list of items, sometimes with interspersed ads in relation to a search query.
ChatGPT has the great potential to change this overall look because it directly provides an answer in the framework of a prose conversation without the possibility of a list or having sponsored results interspersed. The sponsored results are one of the main ways that Google gets revenue, so this is potentially worrisome to the company. It’s hard to see how Google could get sponsored revenue by directly interspersing sponsored comments into a ChatGPT type of dialogue without significantly distorting the results. ChatGPT also greatly disrupts the legions of people who have carefully set up their websites to optimize search engine performance.
Moreover, increasingly, even within Google search results, one doesn’t see a list presented but rather an immediate answer. For instance, if you pose a direct question or an arithmetic problem to Google, you get the answer and are not led to look down a list of search results. People are going to want this to avoid wasting time or having to look any farther on the page than necessary. In this sense, ChatGPT is the extreme scenario when you are given the direct answer in the form of dialogue.
Google is acutely aware of the possible disruption of ChatGPT to its revenue model. This can be seen in numerous news stories about its current panic, including issuing a company-wide “code red” and orienting the organization around generative AI.
References
Is Google’s 20-year dominance of search in peril?
https://www.economist.com/business/2023/02/08/is-googles-20-year-search-dominance-about-to-end
The Slot-Slaughter – Is ChatGPT The End Of Google Ads? – lyftyfy https://www.lyftyfy.com/the-slot-slaughter-is-chatgpt-the-end-of-google-ads/
ChatGPT and Other Chat Bots Are a ‘Code Red’ for Google Search – The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/21/technology/ai-chatgpt-google-search.html
Does the rise of ChatGPT mean the end for Google?
https://adguard.com/en/blog/chatgpt-bing-google-search.html
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