AI chatbot could replace Google’s search engine monopoly within 2 years

Gmail co-creator Paul Buchheit even went so far as to predict that ChatGPT would eliminate the need for Google's search engine altogether, thus disrupting the company's main source of revenue.

"Google may be only a year or two away from total disruption," Buchheit wrote on Twitter, noting that "AI will eliminate the Search Engine Result Page, which is where they make most of their money."

"Even if they catch up on AI," he added, "they can't fully deploy it without destroying the most valuable part of their business!"

His comments came in response to a screenshot depicting the difference in results provided to users by Google and ChatGPT. In stark contrast to the former, the latter returned detailed responses in a tone that appeared far more human.

Buchheit predicted that the chatbot would act as a sort of middleman between the backend of the old search engine and the user, gathering and summarizing relevant information instantly.

He suggested that ChatGPT would do to Google what Google did to The Yellow Pages.

Other users pointed out that while ChatGPT is impressive and will be useful for niche queries, it has a long way to go before it can completely overtake Google for everyday searches.

Since its inception, Google has rapidly risen to assume the position of the number-one search engine. Today, it is by far the most popular, with people often joking that competitors such as Bing and Yahoo are only used to search for Google.

Google has capitalized on its massive market share with ads, a revenue stream that could be dried up by emerging services such as ChatGPT.

ChatGPT was developed and released by San Francisco-based OpenAI, and over a million people signed up to test it in the five days following its launch. You can sign up to try it out here.