James' World 2

The biggest change to the way search engines have delivered information to us since the 1990s is happening right now. No more keyword searching. No more sorting through links to click. Instead, we’re entering an era of conversational search. Which means instead of keywords, you use real questions, expressed in natural language. And instead of links, you’ll increasingly be met with answers, written by generative AI and based on live information from all across the internet, delivered the same way. 

Of course, Google—the company that has defined search for the past 25 years—is trying to be out front on this. In May of 2023, it began testing AI-generated responses to search queries, using its large language model (LLM) to deliver the kinds of answers you might expect from an expert source or trusted friend. It calls these AI Overviews. Google CEO Sundar Pichai described this to MIT Technology Review as “one of the most positive changes we’ve done to search in a long, long time.”

AI Overviews fundamentally change the kinds of queries Google can address. You can now ask it things like “I’m going to Japan for one week next month. I’ll be staying in Tokyo but would like to take some day trips. Are there any festivals happening nearby? How will the surfing be in Kamakura? Are there any good bands playing?” And you’ll get an answer—not just a link to Reddit, but a built-out answer with current results. 

More to the point, you can attempt searches that were once pretty much impossible, and get the right answer. You don’t have to be able to articulate what, precisely, you are looking for. You can describe what the bird in your yard looks like, or what the issue seems to be with your refrigerator, or that weird noise your car is making, and get an almost human explanation put together from sources previously siloed across the internet. It’s amazing, and once you start searching that way, it’s addictive.

And it’s not just Google. OpenAI’s ChatGPT now has access to the web, making it far better at finding up-to-date answers to your queries. Microsoft released generative search results for Bing in September. Meta has its own version. The startup Perplexity was doing the same, but with a “move fast, break things” ethos. Literal trillions of dollars are at stake in the outcome as these players jockey to become the next go-to source for information retrieval—the next Google.

Not everyone is excited for the change. Publishers are completely freaked out. The shift has heightened fears of a “zero-click” future, where search referral traffic—a mainstay of the web since before Google existed—vanishes from the scene. 

I got a vision of that future last June, when I got a push alert from the Perplexity app on my phone. Perplexity is a startup trying to reinvent web search. But in addition to delivering deep answers to queries, it will create entire articles about the news of the day, cobbled together by AI from different sources. 

On that day, it pushed me a story about a new drone company from Eric Schmidt. I recognized the story. Forbes had reported it exclusively, earlier in the week, but it had been locked behind a paywall. The image on Perplexity’s story looked identical to one from Forbes. The language and structure were quite similar. It was effectively the same story, but freely available to anyone on the internet. I texted a friend who had edited the original story to ask if Forbes had a deal with the startup to republish its content. But there was no deal. He was shocked and furious and, well, perplexed. He wasn’t alone. Forbes, the New York Times, and Condé Nast have now all sent the company cease-and-desist orders. News Corp is suing for damages.