Answer Engines, Search Engines & Cultural Impact
In terms of internet time, search engines are ancient things. Dominated today by Google with Bing and Yahoo! (which uses Bing) hanging on for dear life. As privacy concerns by consumers mounted, a privacy first search engine, DuckDuckGo arrived. There’s also Startpage and Searx. But as answer engines arise, things could get very different.
While it is unlikely that search engines are going away entirely, answer engines could have a profound impact on digital culture and thus, the real world. From how and where we seek information, to how we understand reality and potentially creating less variety in human cultures.
An answer engine serves up just that, answers, as opposed to search engines which just provide links to information. It sounds simple but it’s actually very complicated. An entire industry sector arose from search engines with the disciplines of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). These two skills are already undergoing profound changes.
Perplexity AI was the first major answer engine to hit the market and recently, competitor OpenAI of ChatGPT fame, has created their own answer engine. Microsoft does this with Copilot on Bing, which uses ChatGPT.
It’s a lovely idea, an answer engine. It also lends itself very well to voice as a UX for both…
