Can AI Permanently Cripple Google?

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Can AI Permanently Cripple Google?

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There is a school of thought that Alphabet’s (NASDAQ: GOOGL | GOOGL Price Prediction) Google will not be the search engine of the future. However, it dominates the sector worldwide, with several exceptions, including China and Russia. Google might be replaced by ChatGPT, at least among millions of Google’s current users.

The first listing on most Google searches is AI Overview, a new feature showing that Google uses AI to protect its search engine flanks. When asked, “Will ChatGPT replace Google?” The first answer is, “ChatGPT is not likely to replace Google as a search engine because the two technologies have different purposes and capabilities.” One reason is that “ChatGPT may not always produce accurate content.” That begs the question of whether that is true, and if so, can Google’s AI be improved?

However, a Google search on whether AI can replace Google brings back another answer. It is from The New York Times: “Can This A.I.-Powered Search Engine Replace Google? It Has for Me.” The author uses an AI-driven system called “Perplexity.”

What needs to be clarified, and may not be for some time, is whether AI-driven search will develop rapidly improving features and functions. One clear thing is that AI feature improvements come with remarkable rapidity. Forecasting the capabilities, even a few months into the future is almost impossible. Google does give away some features for free.

Google quickly replaced other search engines like Yahoo! during the early 2000s because it was a better product in the eyes of hundreds of millions of users. Alphabet has been smart enough to add AI features to Google search, but in the lightning-paced world of AI, that may not be enough.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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