The ChatGPT-fueled battle for search is bigger than Microsoft or Google

Image courtesy of Forbes

It’s a good time to be a search startup. When I spoke to Richard Socher, the CEO of You.com, last week he was buzzing: “Man, what an exciting day—looks like another record for us,” he exclaimed. “Never had this many users. It’s been a whirlwind.” You wouldn’t know that two of the biggest firms in the world had just revealed rival versions of his company’s product.

In back-to-back announcements last week, Microsoft and Google staked out their respective claims to the future of search, showing off chatbots that can respond to queries with fluid sentences rather than lists of links. Microsoft has upgraded its search engine Bing with a version of ChatGPT, the popular chatbot released by San Francisco–based OpenAI last year; Google is working on a ChatGPT rival, called Bard.

But while these announcements gave a glimpse of what’s next for search, to get the full picture we need to look beyond Microsoft and Google. Although those giants will continue to dominate, for anyone looking for an alternative, search is set to become more crowded and varied.

That’s because, under the radar, a new wave of startups have been playing with many of the same chatbot-enhanced search tools for months. You.com launched a search chatbot back in December and has been rolling out updates since. A raft of other companies, such as Perplexity, Andi, and Metaphor, are also combining chatbot apps with upgrades like image search, social features that let you save or continue search threads started by others, and the ability to search for information just seconds old.

ChatGPT's success has created a frenzy of activity as tech giants and startups alike try to figure out how to give people what they want—in ways they might never have known they wanted.

Old guard, new ideas

Google has dominated the search market for years. “It’s been pretty steady for a long time,” says Chirag Shah, who studies search technologies at the University of Washington. “Despite lots of innovations, the needle hasn’t shifted much.”

That changed with the launch of ChatGPT in November. Suddenly, the idea of searching for things by typing in a string of disconnected words felt instantly old-fashioned. Why couldn’t you just ask for what you want?

People are hooked on this idea of combining chatbots and search, says Edo Liberty, who used to lead Amazon’s AI lab and is now CEO of Pinecone, a company that makes databases for search engines: “It’s the right kind of pairing. It’s peanut butter and jelly.”

Google has been exploring the idea of using large language models (the tech behind chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard) for some time. But when ChatGPT became a mainstream hit, Google and Microsoft made their moves.

So did others. There are now several small companies competing with the big players, says Liberty. “Just five years ago, it would be a fool’s errand,” he says. “Who in their right mind would try to storm that castle?”

Storming the castle

Today, off-the-shelf software has made it easier than ever to build a search engine and plug it into a large language model. “You can now bite chunks off technologies that were built by thousands of engineers over a decade with just a handful of engineers in a few months,” says Liberty.

That’s been Socher’s experience. Socher left his role as chief AI scientist at Salesforce to cofound You.com in 2020. The site acts as a one-stop shop for web-search power users looking for a Google alternative. It aims to give people answers to different types of queries in a range of formats, from movie recommendations to code snippets.

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