Alex Calder, The big news this week is the launch of ChatGPT Search functions for Team and Pro users.
As OpenAI describes it, ‘ChatGPT can now search the web in a much better way than before. You can get fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources, which you would have previously needed to go to a search engine for. This blends the benefits of a natural language interface with the value of up-to-date sports scores, news, stock quotes, and more.’ 1
What crazy trending search topics…
Ignoring that they end a sentence with a proposition and are obsessed with oxford commas (that’s where ChatGPT gets it from!), that statement from OpenAI clearly shows their plans to build products outside their core chat interface and broaden their product offering to other web tools.
I’ve been a user of Perplexity , another AI powered search tool, for a while now. It’s great for when you’re doing what I would call ‘research searches’, i.e. you’re looking for an answer to something and you want detailed, referenced information. Digging into the detail around a business we want to work with or exploring a topic in depth would be good examples for this kind of search.
But, search is fundamentally how we interact with computers on a daily basis. If you take a moment to think about how often you use search tools, I think you’ll be surprised at how much of a muscle memory it is to go to Google as part of the journey to the answer.
Certainly for me, those kind of ‘research searches’ are a relatively small subset of what I look for. I search for the names of news sources I want to read, platforms I need to log into or just sites I want to visit. For those kinds of searches, even the few seconds ChatGPT or Perplexity take to load a conversational version of traditional search results is too long.
That being said, search is changing fundamentally, and AI (as it does in so many settings) is driving that innovation. It stops me in my tracks when I think that I and many others go to sources other than Google for search, when the phrase to search for something is literally to ‘google’ it. This behaviour change has happened at a staggering pace.
We can see this all over the web - incredibly young people (like me…) using TikTok as a starting point to find information about getting into running. And, why wouldn’t they? Are they going to get something more relevant than searching via Google and having to trawl through someone in Ohio’s blog from 2007? I expect so.
It’s something that our sister agency, Anything Is Possible, is working on with clients at the moment - what does that Search universe look like now, and why it’s a non-starter to only think about traditional SEO.
Anyway, that was less about AI news and more a meditation on search, but hopefully you found it useful! Here are some of the things I’ve found interesting this week:
Quick Links
Apple’s equally hyped and disappointingly unavailable Intelligence tools supposedly launched last week. If you’re in the US then you can join the Waiting List via Settings, if you’re in the UK, then you read a polite message telling you that you can’t access it unless you change your language settings and have everything in $ and the dates written backwards. Link.
AI is a victim of it’s own transformational power in many ways, and it’s very easy to dismiss it as hype due to how much it’s talked about. But here’s an example of the exact opposite. Non-profit organisations working with rural farmers in Africa to provide AI farming tools that inform them of what seeds to plant, the ideal growing conditions and how to cultivate them. What’s also interesting is the approach - incubating ideas, developing prototypes and implementing them for specific use cases. This is how we can drive true innovation. Link.
Why have I been constantly refreshing my Google Calendar this week? No, it’s not because I’m checking who’s accepted the invite to our launch event . Google are rolling out a design update - my personal one’s already refreshed, hurry up and roll it out to Workspaces! Link.
Thank you for reading, if you have any questions or want to find out more about the Jagged Edge, get in touch below.
See you next week.
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