Essay: how people will search for information post-AI adoption

For hundreds of thousands of years of our existence, searching for relevant information has always been crucial for our survival.

Back when we were hunters and gatherers, acquiring the information was a matter of life or death - where was food; were there large felines nearby; were there other tribes nearby?

We cannot fly like eagles to scan the environment; we don’t have the bees’ antennae to know the location of flowers from kilometers far away, nor can we echolocate like bats or dolphins.

For thousands of years, we have searched for information through word of mouth limited to our physical location. Most people didn’t search for information. They waited for information to come to them. Only a few adventurers like Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus explored and brought back the information of other parts of the world.

Later after invention of the printing press in 1440, there was more information curated and put into books at scale. Later in 1883, We had Yellow Pages to search for shops and people but we were largely limited to physical locations like libraries.

Then the internet came along. Precisely on September 4th, 1998, Google was launched to the public, which changed everything. People could search the information by keywords and questions and Google would give a list of results, ranked by relevance.

Nowadays, Google.com for the majority of people is the starting point of search for new information (excluding China, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and Russia). It has indexed over 130 trillion web pages as of 2023.

Google.com is the most visited website in the world. It has 90% of the search market share according to Statcounter. 8.5 billion searches are carried out every day on average according to various sources. That allows Google.com to make an ads business out of it - 162 billion USD in revenue in 2022. “Search is the most profitable segment of software”, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft.

For the past few years, things have been changing. 55% of US product searches begin with Amazon. With the popularization of TikTok among GenZ, 40% of them check TikTok and Instagram when they look for a place for lunch. However, we can still argue that when people search for serious information, they still go to Google.com.

Then ChatGPT (an AI application) was launched in November 2022. It impressed the whole world. "In my lifetime, I've seen two demonstrations of technology that struck me as revolutionary... the GUI and ChatGPT", Bill Gates, March 2023. Bill Gates was referring that ChatGPT allows us to interact with machines with human language than just clicking buttons.

ChatGPT was trained on a gigantic dataset of human knowledge (including the entire Wikipedia). Then a series of applications was developed to allow these models to keep up with new information through internet search and embedding private knowledge bases. It can answer our questions, summarize documents, and generate new text on demand according to our specific requirements.

If we think about it, before ChatGPT, we entered what we were searching for in a box, either in Google, Amazon, or TikTok, and then we got a list of answers that we had to go through one by one until we were satisfied with one or two. It was a tiring, repetitive, and monotone process.

ChatGPT instead is like an assistant, available 24/7, with endless patience, answering every time with occasional hallucinations, zero cost for the 3.5 version, and 20 bucks per month for the ChatGPT 4 version. No richest man on earth could have hired such an assistant, no matter how much he or she would pay. Moreover, it provides one result, sometimes good enough to end the search process. Sometimes, it needs some back-and-forth conversations and refreshes to get other answers.

So what will happen now when we need to search for information?

When we have a question in the personal context, there are so many ways to get answers. It is multi-channel. If we want to have strict control over the search process, Google is still the place to go (or Amazon for products). If we need more inspiration, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram provide more visual results. If we feel lazy, ChatGPT can act as our assistant.

Going through a result list, such as Google search results or an Amazon product list, takes a lot of effort. AI could summarize for us and make it much easier.

However, there is inertia of habits. For people who grew up with Google, the natural reflections are still there. I have 3 AI assistants installed on my phone, I barely use one per week at this moment.

In the professional context, the adoption is happening already very fast. For a CEO who has 100,000 people in his or her organization, the search for information to understand what the company is doing becomes suddenly easy. In comparison, when I was a financial analyst working for top management, 30% of my time was searching for information to help executives understand what was happening.

Eventually, when AI is getting good enough (less hallucination and great multi-model visuals), can we imagine starting our search from AI? It is reasonable to imagine so.

This behavior change will have a profound impact on businesses.

On one side, Google (including YouTube and Maps), Amazon, and many others who count on selling ads out of a result list will have to adapt their business models, either by inserting ads in the AI answers or inventing new business models. The tech behind ChatGPT was invented by Google in 2017. They hold it for several years before deploying the tech on its search product. It was precisely because AI will impact its current business model.

On the other side, it will take some time for us to form new habits in how we search for new information, depending on the type of information. It is reasonable to believe that multi-channel search will continue for some years before we fully switch and rely on AI-powered search products.

As of the day of writing, the 2nd of January 2024, search on Amazon for a product is nearly the same as when it was invented almost 30 years ago. When Amazon creates a personal shopping assistant remains to be seen.

This behavior change will also have a profound impact on the environment. AI search generating conversions and images consumes more power than traditional search generating a list of results. Hundreds of millions of queries on ChatGPT can cost the equivalent of energy consumed by 33,000 U.S. households — around one gigawatt-hour a day according to the University of Washington’s research.

Hopefully, the future optimization and investment in renewables by the big tech companies could mitigate the potential environmental impact.

Technology changes our behavior and our behavior in return influences how technology is deployed by companies. A sequence of technological inventions like paper, printing press, electricity, telephone, internet, Google.com, and ChatGPT, has changed how we search for information. It is becoming easier than ever to access the information that we need. However, our attention is limited. It is still our conscious and unconscious decision of what we want and need to know.