The Existential Threat for Search Engines
As the internet picked up steam into the early 21st century, consumers shifted from newspapers as a primary source of information to the internet. Search engines filled the searching gap and sometimes the knowledge gap. Unless they can adapt, search engines may be facing similar challenges as newspapers did.
As newspapers struggled for relevance in the opening decades of the internet, they increased the number of ads. They also began (and still do) to sell more advertorial content. Often called today branded or custom content. Sometimes, it became harder to tell the difference between real journalism and sponsored content. We are seeing a similar pattern with search engines today.
There are two main factors influencing this change in search engine use. Both are driven by human behaviour, not technology.
This is also a great example of how culture changes technology after technology changes a culture. it is human cultural adaptation of technology at its finest.
Today, just look at the first page results of a Google or Bing search. Ads are increasing before you get to non-ad results. But consumers today, know that those “organic” results are anything but. They’re there because brands have spent a lot of money to get SEO experts either contracted or in-house to get them to that placement. Google is also plagued by SEO spam.
Consumers have inherently learned that the first page of Google results is less valuable today since it is either dominated by ads or spam. Google is more than aware of this and trying to figure it out.
To get meaningful results from Google and sometimes even Bing, you need to go to the second or third page. Bing’s answer to this reality has been to use tools like ChatGPT to deliver context and sometimes even knowledge on the first page.
But Bing’s UI is still messy. Microsoft is only just starting to figure out good UI in its information products. It’s hard to shift from making productivity products to making information products. Two entirely different mindsets.
Then there’s the second major issue beyond SEO trickery and the deluge of ads in search engines. It is a shift in how and where people expect and want, to search and a shift from expecting information to wanting context. This may represent the biggest risk to search engines yet.
People don’t want to switch from the apps, channel or service they are in, to another one. This resulted from so many apps implementing sharing and discussion tools within their app to connect with others. Such as being able to integrate Slack with so many other apps. A core function of Microsoft365 apps from PowerPoint to Excel is live collaborative editing and sharing. Same with Google Workspace apps and even Apple’s productivity apps.
So it is a natural progression in terms of how people are finding and managing information, that we would come to expect external search and context, or knowledge delivery, within an app we are using. People are lazy, the less clicks and swipes the better.
Search now needs to be where the human is and it needs to deliver context, not just links. Not finding a share button on an app today is odd. Within a few years, not finding a search button that pulls from a search engine and integrates some form of Generative AI tool like ChatGPT or Bard will also be odd. We will want some type of answer, not a bunch of links.
This is by no means a certainty. But if the way Microsoft is bringing Generative AI tools into not just their search engine, but their entire ecosystem is any indicator, it may well be the future.
This of course, represents an existential risk to search engines like Google or Bing in terms of advertising revenues delivered through their search sites. If people move away from going to your page for search, where and how do you deliver ads?
Then of course is the SEO game. Businesses have a right to be found online and they need to be in order to help drive business opportunities. In a new world of delivering context over links, businesses will have to entirely rethink their content. AI is not likely to help them as engines will be deploying increasingly sophisticated methods of detecting AI written content and demoting them in results.
This is far from the death of Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo or most any search engine. But they’ll need to innovate faster than ever before. And not just in terms of search tools, but their ecosystems as a whole. Microsoft, Google, Apple, will all want to keep however we do search in the coming years, within their own ecosystems. Can they?
Newspapers were around for centuries before they faced a truly existential threat from the internet. Google is just shy of being 25 years old and is now, like all search engines, facing an existential threat. This is an example of how human culture changes technology.
