If you ever run into Dr Mark Murphy at a dental convention of some sort, the first thing out of your mouth should be a request to hear him rap Eminem. Trust me, you will thank me later. The lyrics in the song you will then hear have been on my mind recently “look, if you had one shot, one opportunity to seize everything you ever wanted, one moment, would you capture it? Or just let it slip?”
AI has been the buzzword of this year and beyond. One announcement from OpenAI that really caught my attention was their intent to launch Search GPT, an AI power search engine. I immediately thought, “Whoa, that’s a big step for this new technology!” ChatGPT and the like are all very impressive, but to immediately launch into an endeavor to index the Internet and provide relevant results…that’s a big jump.
This launch was announced in the middle of 2024 and things have been suspiciously quiet since then. So why does all this make me think of a rap song? Well, the team at OpenAI has one shot with Search GPT to seize everything they ever wanted. Are they going to capture it or let it slip? Let me explain.
ChatGPT was a novel experience we had never seen anything like it before. We had all had terrible experiences with chatbots, sure, but never something that was actually helpful. There was little to no frame of reference for people before ChatGPT. OpenAI was able to set the standard and introduce the LLM (Large Language Model) experience to the masses. Not so with search.
We all know what to expect with search. We ask a question and get a bunch of relevant answers back. The public has been familiar with search engines going back to 1994. Since then, the phrase, “Just Google it,” has become ubiquitous for using a search engine to find answers. We all know what to expect and how to use it. So why does this matter? In order for Search GPT to be successful it has to supplant Google in answer delivery. That’s a tall order.
Don’t believe me? Let me put it like this, do you still use Ask Jeeves? The public has standards and expectations when it comes to search. We expect a group of relevant results for us to select from instantaneously, and for those results to be easy to navigate from whatever device we are on. All this to say that maybe this is why Search GPT is taking a while to roll out. They have one shot. No one is going to spend more than 45 seconds trying to figure out how to use Search GPT, and if you get burned by the user experience, it’s going to take A LOT to get you to try it again.
Don’t get me wrong, I am super excited for Google to have an actual competitor in the space (sorry Bing, but we all know the truth, you’re not my default search engine, and you never will be). Everything is at stake with this launch and I really hope they capture the moment and become competitive with Google, only time will tell.
