Google disrupted the search engine market 25 years ago. Now it looks set to be the focus of change. Photo / Getty Images
The big tech story of 2024 is the onslaught on Google’s search and digital advertising businesses by US regulators and a host of AI upstart competitors.
This has major implications for how we find things on the internet and also how we are shown advertisements for things online as credible alternatives to googling start to emerge.
Recently, I interviewed seasoned Sydney-based business journalist Paul McIntyre about the anti-trust lawsuits Google has faced in the US, including a court case brought by the Department of Justice which found that Google has an illegal monopoly in the search engine market.
McIntyre, an executive editor of media and advertising publication Mi3 and a Kiwi by birth, sat in on the latest anti-trust case against Google in Alexandria, Virginia, in September at which the US Government accused Google of stitching up the digital advertising market.
“This is not about whether Google worked,” he told me on The Business of Tech podcast. “The reality was the products were good. It’s what allowed them to… make their products untouchable by competitors that’s the issue here.”
So, what would happen if Google didn’t control the ad supply system like it does now? Would there be more innovation?
OpenAI’s new search experience
That’s a tantalising “what-if” but we’re now getting a glimpse of how researching on the web may look in future without Google’s search engine at the centre of the experience. For the past week, I’ve been conducting web searches using ChatGPT Search, the latest addition to ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot from US company OpenAI.
ChatGPT Search has been in pilot mode since July and I was only able to access it as a ChatGPT Plus member, which costs US$20 a month. A version of ChatGPT Search is also available to registered waitlist users.
“We’ll roll out to all free users over the coming months,” OpenAI indicated in a blog post.