The Post-Google World
The shift to AI-native search will be one of these “slowly, then quite suddenly” moments of mass consumer behavior change!
While we don’t know in the long run who will win, it’s critical to consider the irreversibility of an AI-native search UX.
If you use a tool like Perplexity AI (paradoxically outside the tech world, many have no clue of what that is), while in the future you might switch to other AI-first engines, one thing is for sure: you won’t switch back to traditional (Google-like) search…
One of the worst and yet most common comments I've seen many experts making when ChatGTP came out in 2022 was how it could beat Google at its own game.
I’ve found this quite short-sighted, not because a ChatGPT-like interface would not supplant (it’s doing precisely that), but because these “experts” still use the search lens to analyze the current context.
Search, a la Google, with all its fundamental assumptions, is gone forever.
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.
Those who have been in the existing market for a long time assume they understand what’s going on and keep using the same framework of analysis until it’s still too late.
So, in a usual human psychology cycle, from denial to acceptance, since it takes a few steps in between, due to the “expert fallacy,” these people will deny until it’s too late.
Anyhow, this isn’t a post against experts and their fallacies, but rather about where we’ve been in the last 30 years (hint: where Google has brought us), where we are (hint: not where Google wants us to be), and where we’re going next” (hint: in a post- Google world - at least for search, also as a spoiler, that doesn’t mean Google, now Alphabet will be irrelevant in that phase, it’ll be something else).
So bear with me!
Let’s start from the early days of Google to understand its underlying assumptions, architecture, and business model.
From there, reconstruct why this current paradigm, based on LLMs (and now reasoning), is something else, what it will evolve into, and why the “competitive lens of search” no longer works to assess where we are and where we’re going next!