People often confuse cool tech with good business. It might be the case a few times but great businesses are more than just cool tech. This week’s case study is to explore this in the recent Google vs Microsoft rivalry regarding generative AI integration in Search engines.
So why is Google losing? or is it actually losing?
Here are some quick facts to consider about Google:
✅ With Google, users can make queries and see the most relevant information created by other people on the Internet. Google’s Moat here is that no other search engine can find the most relevant information according to the search queries. It can understand your intent from queries and bring the results you expect.
✅ Google has no liability for all the information you consume from the websites you visit via Google. If it’s useful, wrong, misleading, all these liabilities are directly on websites. Sure it indicates Google’s performance but there is no direct liability.
✅ Google benefits both you as a user, and website creators as a content provider. This enables a sustainable supply of information.
✅ Google’s search Ads business model is well integrated.
✅ Users are very use to Google as a search monopoly. You use Google on Safari, Chrome, Android, Siri.
All these facts give Google a very solid business model. It is a combination of tech and sustainable value creation which benefits everyone.
Now let’s consider Bing+ChatGPT
✅ It is a very cool tech that can create content on the basis of my query. It works really well however it does provide misinformation from time to time.
❌ It’s not reliable. If it returns misinformation, Bing will be held accountable for this. This will directly damage the brand’s trust.
❌ It is expensive. AI generative text requests are expensive and not scalable at the search engine level right now.
❌ Dilemma around content scrapping and training. Content creators are not being rewarded and ChatGPT scrapping content from the website provides no incentive to content creators.
❌ No well-integrated ad model.
❌ It will take a tremendous amount of marketing to educate users and change their search behavior.
So overall, ChatGPT+Bing might bring a very cool tech to the market but they are in no position to challenge Google’s business model for now. There is a long way ahead for Bing to build a sustainable business model to dethrone the undisputed Search king. However, Google’s reputation as the number 1 search engine has taken a hit and might take some time to recover.