The Search Engine and Ad wars
Latest LLM benchmarks and funding news for mushrooming AI startups are the most common news we see everyday now. Its fall of 2024 and the world can not be any closer to a full scale war capable of wiping out all of humanity. Yet, news about latest technological advances keep coming out everyday and probably are a good thing as they serve as a good distraction for the masses
People are so focused on AI taking their jobs that they’re overlooking a far greater risk — the potential danger to human existence
The Latest Announcement
OpenAI has launched its own search engine and has officially entered the search and ads market today
What it means -
- Unlike the previous releases, where ChatGPT had the capability of regurgitating information learnt over a fixed time and had a cutoff date. example — it wont know anything that happened after the date it was trained. This changes now with the LLM gaining access to the real time information
- Since LLMs have the capability to understand and comprehend natural languages, they are now well placed to interact with humans to better understand the queries, understand the intent and tailor the output to the context of the ongoing conversation
- Google, Bing and other search engines have some serious competition now since they had a good time ruling the search space for the longest stint in the lifetime of the internet
How it changes the existing industries
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This industry is more than $70Bn in 2024 and has over time mostly been shaped up by Google’s algorithm that has more than 90% share of this pie. A lot of smaller companies came up to cater to the demand of pages ranking higher on the Google results as the internet grew. If OpenAI and other similar companies provide a real time search engine, pages would have to go to these companies for making themselves visible to the engine thats behind the LLM. Search ability and featuring on the top google results is what makes the “Awareness” and “Interest” parts of the sales funnel and plays major role in driving sales. Google and other engines already started steering user decisions by providing suggestions while the user is typing a search query.
2. OSINT or Open Source Intelligence
Google Dorking has been one of the most powerful weapons in a cyber security professionals and threat actor’s arsenal. These are special commands when used with normal google searches, spit out information like security misconfigurations, open ports, shared documents and shared credentials in GitHub repos for example. The search engine bot or crawler would index all this information when casually visiting a page and present to the user who uses the right keywords
The page — https://www.stationx.net/google-dorking-commands/ has details on Google dorking and even a dorking command generator to generate a well structured query for this purpose
The introduction of an LLM that can search internet in real time would change this industry as well. Maybe in future, if the introduction of more players in the LLM search engines space, Google and other crawlers have no incentive to index this raw information. Though most likely, an LLMs will be just an interface between a search engine and a human, it will have it’s own understanding of what to present as an output and even detecting intent. So will be interesting how OSINT shapes up in a post OpenAI search world
What Next?
This space is becoming interesting to watch, as the LLMs gain access to real time information, soon they will be able to update their neural networks by feeding on the influx of new information. Governments will probably have to step up the efforts to regulating AIs if they wish to do so because this may change things much sooner than expected
The companies working on these technologies will have to finish things up soon as well before the AI hype cycle ends(and it may, like the hypes of the past) because the resource intensive work they have been doing wont be that easy if the fundings dry up
Interesting times ahead!! Thanks for reading!!
