You might remember I was talking about searchGPT a while back, I did say that Sam was bluffing when he was saying that search is just not enough of a market for them. Well apparently it is a large enough market for them 😂.
This is proof that you can’t trust this man on his word, he’ll play it the way he wants and needs it to. Enough about Sam, let’s see the product!
I’ll start with what Google search is and what it is the baseline it has to beat.
Google offers a suite of fantastic products to use in exchange for your private information. We all agree we have to pay a price for them, be that money or personal info, hopefully not both. 🫢
It took years to regulate this and make google a little bit transparent about what information they take in fact from us, and finally label what is an ad in the search results and what is actually something we’re looking for.
My biggest concern here is that since the information is aggregated, rephrased and converted into a search result, it will be hardly distinguishable between ads and searches. It’ll take a while until we’re going to figure this out. 😢
Google search, is a product that basically had not been reshaped in years. You have a single input, add some text in it, and then the magic happens. If you are a power user of google search you know you can use quotes for “exact matches”, -<keyword> to exclude some specific searches from the site and much more. There are plenty of cheat sheets out there, feel free to google them 😅
SearchGPT comes in with a little bit of a different approach with a way more user friendly perspective. Instead of learning how to write your search request example you simply query what you need.
Google
SearchGPT:
SearchGPT is much more natural 👏
Now when you know what your goal is exactly, life is easy, as is the search for it. Let’s try and refine the search. Just to clarify, refining in google is way harder!
Life as Google Search reflects it, is very hard, with very generic requests.
Let’s say we want to find an actor from a movie we saw a couple of years ago. We don’t remember his name and the movie we saw him in, but we do remember what the movie was about. We also remember what he was wearing.
So search would look like:
“looking for an actor, that played in a sci-fi movie about wars in space, he wore a brown leather jacket and had a green girlfriend”
Google:
SearchGPT:
Traditionally I’d google way more times before I can find the right alley to narrow down my search trajectory and I’d definitely have to do it in steps.
Just look at how many attempts I needed before I got where I actually needed to get.
At this point, I still haven’t hit my goal, which is to find out the actor’s name… Now I have to open the link, scroll down, find the movie cast and find the relevant information myself.
With search GPT you could just specify this in a follow-up message, and you know that it already has the context of your previous messages. It’ll narrow down the query for you automatically, and get the most relevant information from it.
Trip Planner 🏖️
Next thing that searchGPT introduced is a Trip Planner. As the name says it helps you plan a trip. Example: “plan me a trip in tokyo for the next 5 days, I have a tight budget, please avoid very expensive places.”
I do not have a comparable thing to give you. The current alternative here would be to do research, read blogs, study instagram pages and reels to understand what to do, where to go and how to find the relevant info. Google is just not there yet.
This is very cool! 🫢
Now about the competition again, google has been the leader for so many years, they have all the needed resources, ambition and motivation to be the king of the hill 👑, yet OpenAI is gaining speed fast ↗️.
AI is doing extraordinarily well at summarizing text and getting the most out of it. Is this the beginning of the end for google search? 😱 Will our vocabulary extend with a new verb “to gpt”?
