Will ChatGPT Help Microsoft Bing Challenge Google Search?

How will ChatGPT change search? This is one of the hottest questions in marketing and technology. And reportedly, Microsoft just might provide an answer by incorporating the generative AI tool into Microsoft's Bing search engine. Let's take a closer look at this question and the speculation about Bing adopting ChatGPT. Spoiler alert: I don't think ChatGPT will challenge the dominance of search engines.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a conversational bot from OpenAI. ChatGPT uses artificial intelligence (AI) to answer questions and create content ranging from poetry to blog posts to code. ChatGPT is an example of generative AI, which refers to a type of AI that uses unsupervised learning algorithms to create new digital images, video, songs, text or code. When AI generates its own content, it's generative AI.

Although ChatGPT is not the first AI-powered chatbot, it has created a sensation because of its ability to quickly generate well-articulated, polished content in response to user prompts. OpenAI made ChatGPT available for free public experimentation on November 30. ChatGPT reportedly attracted 1 million users within its first five days of availability.

ChatGPT and search

It didn't take long for some industry experts to speculate that ChatGPT might challenge the dominance of traditional search engines such as Google Search. Here's why:

Google answers questions by providing links to other sources of information. From there, a searcher must click on links to find out more detail. But ChatGPT? No muss, no fuss! ChatGPT responds with a single answer that does all the heavy lifting for a searcher and synthesizes information.

Think about that radical change for a moment: a quick and complete answer to searches. No friction. No clicking around for more data.

But this means less engagement. Less time spent on Google Search. And Google needs people to remain engaged on Google Search to attract advertisers. Google needs searchers to click on ads such as sponsored results to generate revenue.

ChatGPT could conceivably upend the foundation of Google's advertising business. As writer Alex Kantrowitz observed,

[Google] makes money when people click ads next to search results, and it's awkward to fit ads into conversational replies. Imagine receiving a response and then immediately getting pitched to go somewhere else-it feels slimy and unhelpful. Google thus has little incentive to move us beyond traditional search, at least not in a paradigm-shifting way, until it figures out how to make the money aspect work. In the meantime, it'll stick with the less impressive Google Assistant.

In fact, Google does have a chatbot of its own: LaMDA, a chatbot that does what ChatGPT does. But LaMDA is in development. And Google isn't ready to unleash a work in progress for public use. The existence of LaMDA shows that Google understands chatbots are part of the company's future. But reportedly ChatGPT has created a sense of urgency for Google to figure out just how AI will shape that future.

But not everyone is convinced that ChatGPT will upend search as we know it. ChatGPT has caught flak for making mistakes and fabricating answers. As noted, here:

. . . the problem is that ChatGPT's answers are not always correct. In fact, it often hallucinates and states completely wrong facts. Behind the veneer of literacy, ChatGPT is a very advanced autocomplete engine. It takes your prompt (and chat history) and tries to predict what should come next. And it doesn't get things right, even if its answers mostly look plausible.

Addressing the truthfulness of ChatGPT's output will be a major challenge. Unfortunately, there is currently no way to tell hallucinations from truths in ChatGPT's output, unless you verify its answers with some other source (using Google maybe?). But that would be self-defeating if the point is to use the large language model as a replacement for search engines.

ChatGPT is also under fire for providing biased information. And as discussed here, ChatGPT requires much effort to update its knowledge panel (its current universe of knowledge ends at 2019).

Then there is the question about whether people will trust ChatGPT responses. According to a 2020 survey conducted by seoClarity, 81.8% of Americans say they mostly trust the results they see on Google. However, respondents age 60 and over were twice as likely to distrust the results on Google than the national average.

One disadvantage ChatGPT currently has is that it does not cite the information for its answers. For example, if you pose a question like "What is the greatest health threat to children in the United States?" the bot will return a bulleted list of existing health threats, but it will not cite the source(s) of the data. Will people trust ChatGPT if they don't know where the data is coming from?

A user on Twitter (@RobertRMorris) posted a thread on January 6 where he described that his organization, koko, that provides free 24/7 peer support and self-help tools offered data from ChatGPT to help peer supporters of their network craft their responses.

The ChatGPT assisted response feature was opt-in, so everyone on the platform knew about the feature. In all, they provided mental health support to about 4,000 people (30,000 messages) using responses from ChatGPT. The group's human workforce supervised the AI-driven responses.

The result? Messages from the bot were rated higher than those written by humans on their own. Response times went down 50% to under a minute, but, once people understood that the messages were co-authored by a machine, they no longer worked. In a tweet, Morris wrote: "Once people learned the messages were co-created by a machine, it didn't work. Simulated empathy feels weird, empty."

Morris also noted that machines aren't expending any genuine effort to take time out of their day to think about you.

Will people extend this view toward AI-driven search results? Only time will tell whether they will be trusted or not. There's also the question of whether people will always want a conversational answer to their question. Google's Featured Snippets have proven that search results don't need to be super-long and conversational to be valuable.

What is Microsoft Bing doing with ChatGPT?

Microsoft Bing, the second most popular search engine in the world (a very distant second behind Google), is reportedly going to hit all these questions head-on by incorporating ChatGPT. According to The Information:

Microsoft could soon get a return on its $1 billion investment in OpenAI, creator of the ChatGPT chatbot, which gives humanlike text answers to questions. Microsoft is preparing to launch a version of its Bing search engine that uses the artificial intelligence behind ChatGPT to answer some search queries rather than just showing a list of links, according to two people with direct knowledge of the plans. Microsoft hopes the new feature, which could launch before the end of March, will help it outflank Google, its much bigger search rival.

But Microsoft is still weighing both the chatbot's accuracy and how quickly it can be included in the search engine. The initial release may be a limited test to a narrow group of users.

On the one hand, this development could give Microsoft a boost in its quest to challenge Google. As The Verge reported,

By using the technology behind ChatGPT . . . Bing could provide more humanlike answers to questions instead of just links to information. Both Google and Bing already surface relevant information from links at the top of many search queries, but Google's knowledge panels are particularly widespread when it comes to searching for information about people, places, organizations, and things.

Microsoft's use of ChatGPT-like functionality could help Bing rival Google's Knowledge Graph, a knowledge base that Google uses to serve up instant answers that are regularly updated from crawling the web and user feedback. If Microsoft is ambitious, though, it could even go much further, offering many new types of AI-based functionality.

On the other hand, Microsoft Bing also has advertising revenue to protect. Bing generated almost as much advertising revenue as Twitter and Snap combined in 2021.

How will Bing incorporate ChatGPT without threatening its own ad revenue? You can be sure Google will be watching closely.

So, what should businesses do about ChatGPT and its relationship to search? For now:

• Do experiment with it. Lianna Kissinger Virizlay, Investis Digital vice president of Experience Design at Investis Digital, recently discussed some content creation applications of ChatGPT as well as risks for using it. Consultant Alyedya Solis recently published a guide that discusses 20 ways to incorporate ChatGPT into search engine optimization (SEO), ranging from generating metadata for pages to keyword clustering.
• Go in with eyes wide open. Understand fully ChatGPT's mistakes and vulnerability to bias. As Lianna Kissinger Virizlay provided an in-depth examination of the risks, which also include problems with plagiarism and privacy. Proceed with caution.
• If you are an advertiser on Bing, and indeed Microsoft moves forward with ChatGPT, ask Microsoft how the company is overcoming ChatGPT's limitations and problems.
• If you're all in with Google as an advertiser, keep doing what you are doing. Google has bigger near-term issues to worry about with advertising, including the threat that TikTok poses to YouTube. ChatGPT has a long way to go.
• There are Chrome extensions such as ChatGPT for Search Engines that allow you to view search query responses from the bot right in the SERPs. This allows you to see how the SERPs compare with the ChatGPT response.

Contact Investis Digital

To learn more about how Investis Digital can help you improve your brand via search, check out our expertise. If you have questions about how Investis Digital can help your brand improve customer engagement in organic search, please reach out.

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.