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AI’s First Victim: The Search Engine

Google’s revolutionary search engine was one of the most significant developments in the history of the Internet. There used to be about a dozen different search engines, and they were all terrible. 

WebCrawler

Lycos

Alta Vista

Excite

Yahoo 

Ask Jeeves

Dogpile

Jump Station

AOL 

Anyone feeling nostalgic?  I didn’t think so.

Google arrived like a breath of fresh air. I don’t know why Google was vastly superior to its predecessors, but superior it was. Not long after its arrival Google mimicked Xerox’s noun as verb status. People no longer searched topics; they Googled them.

It’s an old story. A success becomes a monopoly, and the monopoly grows morphs into a fat, lazy bully. In the early days, Google would list two or three paid advertisers followed by thousands of nonpaying sites. 

Over time, non-commercial sites became harder to find. Obscure sites became harder to find. Sites that strayed from political orthodoxy got buried. There were and are other search engines. There are strengths and weaknesses to all of them but none of them have threatened Google’s dominance or livelihood. AI in general, and Chat GPT in particular, threaten both.

I don’t know when AI will start writing sitcoms, or devising original designs that you can race to the patent office or devise a better legal strategy than the Brioni-clad counselor. What I can tell you is that Chat GPT can outperform search engines on a jet engine to lawn mower scale.

Put another way, Alta Vista helped us find the needle in the haystack. Google gave us smaller haystacks. Chat GPT just gives us the damn needle. Google that.

Editor-In-Chief