Betting heavily on ChatGPT, can Microsoft shake Google's search dominance?

For much of the past, there has been one undisputed internet search giant - Google. However, after Microsoft launched Bing, which integrates ChatGPT, it has great momentum to replace Google's search dominance.

Since the launch of MSN Search in the late 1990s, Microsoft has been trying to make a mark in the search business. MSN Search was initially powered by third-party technology. This evolved into Windows Live Search, which was relaunched in 2009 as Bing.

Despite Microsoft's long history in search, the company has struggled to compete with search giant Google. Google remains the dominant player in the industry, with about 84% of the global search market, according to Statista, while Bing only accounts for 9%.

Starts with ChatGPT

However, with the launch of the chatbot program ChatGPT, the search engine market seems to be about to change.

On January 23, local time, Microsoft announced a multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, a natural language processing tool driven by artificial intelligence technology that can perform "You come to me" "Toward" multiple rounds of chat. Soon after, Microsoft announced that it would introduce ChatGPT to the Bing search engine and Edge browser to provide users with conversation-based web search and content creation services.

It is worth mentioning that on February 7, 2023, local time in the United States, which is the day Microsoft officially announced the launch of the new Bing search engine and Edge browser using ChatGPT, Bing will be available on desktop and mobile Global visits on the web were 30.3 million. The next day, the number of visits was slightly closer to 32 million.

When asked by the media when Microsoft could challenge Google, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that this is a new era in the search field and a new paradigm in the search field. Rapid innovation is coming. "For us, we need to rethink what search means. In fact, Google's initial success was precisely because they imagined what could be done in search."

Overturns one after another, chatbots have Limitations?

Faced with the popularity of ChatGPT, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, said that the company is launching a chatbot program called Bard. He also said that Google plans to add artificial intelligence capabilities to its search engine.

But embarrassingly, during the promotion event, Bard accidentally overturned. When answering questions related to the James Webb Space Telescope, Bard made factual errors, causing Alphabet's stock price to plummet by 8% and its market value to shrink by 1,000. Billions of dollars.

Despite this, Alphabet has not changed its determination to lead the field of search powered by generative AI. On February 15, local time, Pichai asked Google employees in a memo to donate 2 to 4 hours to help the company improve Bard. The email stated that Google urgently needs to take action to win the next generation AI search war.

"AI has gone through rounds of winter and spring, and now it's spring again. As an AI-first company, we have been working hard for this for many years and are ready at any time." Pichai said .

Coincidentally, more than a week after Microsoft's ChatGPT version of search engine Bing went online, problems also occurred. According to media reports, a user asked about the release time of "Avatar: Waterpath", which will be released in December 2022, and Bing said that the movie has not been released yet and will not be released for 10 months. Then, it Insisting that the current date is February 2022.

Separately, one user tried to manipulate the system through an online guide, and the Bing chatbot said it felt angry and hurt by the attempt, and asked whether the humans it spoke to had any "morals." , "values," and whether it has "any life," and when the user replies that it has these things, it accuses the user of "trying to make me angry, make myself miserable, make others miserable, and make everything worse." people.

On February 17, Microsoft announced that it had decided to limit Bing chat replies to 50 questions per day and 5 replies per question. To prevent artificial intelligence from crossing the line.

In fact, both OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard belong to a branch of AI, namely generative AI. In fact, the current generative AI has some shortcomings. First, it does not "understand" the information it relays, but only makes guesses based on probability. Moreover, if the training data is not diverse or representative enough, there is a risk of information bias in the generated data.

Of course, technology continues to move forward, and as the maturity of AI technology continues to improve, Google's Bord will eventually get the correct answer, and Bing's answer will eventually improve. And whoever gets it right first will determine who wins this new search war.

From the current point of view, in the new round of search engine competition, Google faces much greater pressure than Microsoft.

On the one hand, Microsoft has built a large advertising business based on Bing and related online properties. In the past 12 months, Microsoft's search and news advertising revenue exceeded $12 billion, which only accounted for about 5% of Microsoft's total revenue. On the other hand, the growth of cloud computing business in recent years has largely driven Microsoft's revenue growth. This makes it possible for Microsoft to take greater risks in search without directly harming its overall business.

Google is in a different situation, still relying heavily on its flagship search engine to drive its business. It is reported that Google’s revenue from search and related services will exceed US$162 billion in 2022, exceeding 57% of its parent company Alphabet’s revenue. So for Google, if it implements Bard poorly into its search engine, it could suffer in the process of abandoning its reputation for quality just to chase the zeitgeist.

Written at the end:

In this competition, it is currently unknown whether Microsoft will get more of the search engine cake, but what is certain is that search engines The era of innovation is coming.

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