There will never be another Internet search war like the one that began this week between Google and Microsoft. Not just because Microsoft has a brand new sparkling technology at its disposal, with his OpenAI artificial language intelligence par excellence, but also because the premise of competition is evolving.
There are very clear reasons why Google is leading the search race these days. Competitors, especially Microsoft's Bing, have been unable to come up with anything innovative or outstanding enough to overcome Google's significant branding and distribution advantages. This pattern is unlikely to be broken by chat-based AI powering the latest Bing improvements. Google was taken aback, but should be poised to compete with Microsoft in the coming weeks. If this was a repeat of the previous search wars, Google would win easily.
However, Microsoft has made his four main tools available this time around, adding to the ambiguity of the results.
Economy comes first. Full-text search engines are expensive to operate due to the high cost of "reading" web pages using natural language processing. In an interview with the Financial Times last week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed that she was prepared to cut search advertising revenue and attack Google's main revenue stream.
His second weapon at Microsoft is well known.
Dissemination on computers. This week's confrontation is portrayed as a continuation of the long and unwarranted conflict between Google and Bing. However, the company's real competitive advantage is likely to be Microsoft's Edge browser, which is admired by the tech community. This week we announced new text generation and search capabilities built into the browser. Imagine Edge instantly reducing long on-screen content to his five bullet points when you press a key.
In an interview with her FT, Nadella explained that in her conflict with Google, she will initially focus on her Windows users. Edge, with her 11% market share in desktop browsers, surpasses Bing's 3% market share in the search industry, giving Microsoft a foothold in the vital lives of millions of information workers. I have.
The edge Microsoft has gained through generative AI is his third tool in the company's arsenal. The technology gained a lot of attention after the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT late last year. But in reality, this race started more than three years before him when Microsoft acquired his first $1 billion stake in OpenAI. At that point, we started building the computing infrastructure needed to handle OpenAI's sophisticated, large-scale language models and came up with the idea to integrate this technology into our services.
When it comes to AI, Google has a lot of expertise. But Microsoft at least gives itself a chance to set the bar in terms of quality and price through the advantage of offering the latest major language systems.
With multiple enterprise customers, the company's footprint serves as the fourth weapon in its arsenal. In addition to web crawling, this means that customers can use their own data to manipulate a wide range of language models and customize output for different companies. Due to the high importance of generative AI in commercial software, Microsoft can integrate generative AI into a wide variety of applications.
Regardless of the application you use, at some point the software will start collecting important data and give you an idea of what to do next.
This brings us to an important point regarding the current search warfare on the Internet:
They are trying to change people's prejudices against online searches. Whatever people do, enabling them to find and use information in the most efficient way is increasingly key to their success. Many people will continue to use the search box for years to come because old habits are hard to break. However, these visits are likely to become less frequent as new and convenient means of finding and modifying information permeate their lives.
One reason is Nadella and her other Microsoft colleagues this week's attempt to reshape the Internet search industry. They described it as the world's largest software market, worth more than $200 billion a year, in which Microsoft has little participation despite being so vital to consumers' lives. .
It will be difficult to break Google's domination of online search. But this week's stock market volatility shows that Wall Street is beginning to realize the disruptive potential of generative AI. Established players, even Microsoft, are not really safe without using technology to their advantage.