search engines vs. large language models

One of the worst and yet most common comments I've seen many experts making when ​ChatGTP came about was how it could beat ​Google at its own game.

That completely misses the fact that when a new player comes in a disruptive way, what the new player brings to the market is not only not comparable to what has been done before but something completely different.

Thus, not only is ChatGTP not beating Google in its own game, but it doesn't need to do that at all to win.

In 1998, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page explained the architecture of a new search engine in a paper entitled The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.​

That was the birth of Google!

Google's ability to scale was given by this new architecture of crawling, indexing, and ranking. Thanks to the Page Rank algorithm, pages based on users' searches and intents could be ranked and easily found on a web that was growing exponentially.

Back then, both Brin and Page were quite skeptical about the advertising model regarding search.

As they explained then: "We expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."

Let's go back to how search engines work, starting with Google.