- In milestone, SpaceX 'catches' megarocket booster after test flight
- In a first, SpaceX 'catches' megarocket booster after test flight
- Bangladeshi Hindus shrug off attack worries to celebrate festival
- Ubisoft fears assassin's hit over falling sales
- Vietnam, China hold talks on calming South China Sea tensions
- SpaceX will try to 'catch' giant Starship rocket shortly before landing
- Japan's former empress Michiko discharged after surgery: reports
- Japan's former empress Michiko discharged after surgey: reports
- 'Little Gregory' murder haunts France 40 years on
- Tariffs, tax cuts, energy: What is in Trump's economic plan?
- Amazon wants to be everything to everyone
- Jewish school in Canada hit by gunfire for second time
- With medical report Harris seeks to play health card against Trump
- China-EU EV tariff talks in Brussels end with 'major differences': Beijing
- Buried Nazi past haunts Athens on liberation anniversary
- Harris to release medical report confirming fitness for presidency: campaign
- Nobel prize a timely reminder, Hiroshima locals say
- China offers $325 bn in fiscal stimulus for ailing economy
- Small Quebec company dominates one part of NHL hockey: jerseys
- Boeing to cut 10% of workforce as it sees big Q3 loss
- Want to film in Paris? No sexism allowed
- US, European markets rise as investors weigh rates, earnings
- In Colombia, children trade plastic waste for school supplies
- JPMorgan Chase profits top estimates, bank sees 'resilient' US economy
- Little progress at key meet ahead of COP29 climate summit
- 'Party atmosphere': Skygazers treated to another aurora show
- Kyrgyzstan opens rare probe into glacier destruction
- European Mediterranean states discuss Middle East, migration
- Thunberg leads pro-Palestinian, climate protest in Milan
- Stock markets diverge before China weekend briefing
- EU questions shopping app Temu over illegal products risk
- Han Kang's books sell out in South Korea after Nobel win
- Shanghai markets sink ahead of briefing on mixed day for Asia
- Investors, analysts eye bigger China stimulus at Saturday briefing
- Musk unveils robotaxi, pledges it 'before 2027'
- At least 11 dead in Florida but Hurricane Milton not as bad as feared
- Asian markets mixed after Wall St drop, Shanghai dips before briefing
- Automaker Stellantis says CEO will retire in 2026
- Musk's promised robotaxi unveil delayed
- On US coast, wind power foes embrace 'Save the Whales' argument
- At least 10 dead in Florida after Hurricane Milton spawns tornadoes
- Internet Archive reels from 'catastrophic' cyberattack, data breach
- Wall Street stocks retreat from records on US inflation data
- Israel strikes central Beirut, killing 22
- Solar storm could impact US hurricane recovery efforts: agency
- Delta eyes Election Day travel pullback as profits climb
- Florida battered by hurricane, floods but spared 'worst-case scenario'
- UK's William and Kate in first joint public engagement since cancer treatment
- Over 200 women in legal talks with Harrods over Fayed abuse claims
- A very stiff breeze: BBC says sorry for 20,000 kph wind forecast
Online search to make up lost time with AI
Online search, dominated by Google for 25 years, has become as banal as making a phone call, but it could finally be getting a profound reset thanks to artificial intelligence.
The classic search and click made ubiquitous by the Google behemoth is getting a major AI makeover as bots ChatGPT, Bard or Bing see hundreds of millions of web surfers seek answers to life's questions in a new way.
"People are realizing how many times they use Google search, not to find a webpage, but to answer a question," said Stefan Sigg, Chief Product Officer at Germany-based Software AG.
Microsoft, long considered big tech's boring uncle, has jumped fearlessly and some say blindly into generative AI search with an update to Bing, the long struggling also-ran to Google.
Bing's bot, which was released worldwide after three months of testing, responds directly to a query instead of throwing out a pageful of links for the search user to wade and click through.
With a prompt, Bing will compare two products, brainstorm vacation plans or reassuringly help prepare a job interview, for example.
- 'Heavy lifting' -
"Now, search does the heavy lifting for you," said Cathy Edwards, VP Engineering at Google, during the company’s annual I/O developers conference in California.
The user no longer has to "sift through the information and then piece things together," she said.
At the conference, matching Bing, Google presented the latest iteration of its web search juggernaut, but instead of the constellation of links that confronts you today, a chatbot offered a few paragraphs to answer what you were looking for.
Google's AI amped search engine will slowly be released in the United States as a start, the company said.
"What we're trying to do is make it more natural and intuitive, as easy as asking a friend and getting information from someone who's really knowledgeable for any question you have in the world," Elizabeth Reid, Vice President of Search, told AFP.
Beyond search, Google and Microsoft have deployed generative AI tools to other products, from cloud to word processing, presenting bots as helpful "co-pilots," to use the term hammered home by the Windows-maker.
- Personal 'genie' -
"I think search is going to be fractured into a million pieces, and integrated into all sorts of interfaces, and not just one monolithic centralized place, which is what Google has become," said John Battelle, author and media entrepreneur.
But if every website acts like a faithful friend, it will become ever more difficult to distinguish good information from bad, he warned.
"Would you trust an AI travel agent to give you the right deal? No," Battelle said.
"I want my own 'genie', my 'agent' to negotiate with the website. If it's just me against an AI, I'm gonna lose. I want one on my side."
Battelle's "genie" would digest a user’s information from the smartphone, computer, TV or car to help answer and act for the user in life online.
The bot, powered by personal data, would buy the best vacuum cleaner according to your tastes, habits and current promotions, sparing a long and tedious search
The AI personal assistant would have to come for a fee, ensuring that personal data wasn’t harvested and sold to the highest bidder for advertising or online tracking, as it is on social media.
Startups such as Replika, Anima and others are already moving into the companion AI space.
- 'Vital role' -
For the time being, Google isn't going to disappear, said Jim Lecinski, professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management.
"We could have had this same conversation about four years ago with the advent of voice assistants like Alexa or Siri,"
"Oh wow, search is going away because people are just going to speak their query to their car and device on their kitchen counter. Well, here we are," he said.
The disruption of generative AI could, however, challenge the internet's business model, as it can allow users to find the product they want "without having to click on an ad," Lecinski said.
But he has no doubt that the giants, ad-based Google and Meta first among them, will find solutions.
In the new version of Google search presented on Wednesday, the ads still appear, either up at the top of the page or lower in the results, depending on the question asked.
"I don't think we can predict what the future will have, but we do think ads will continue to play a vital role," said Google's Reid.
H.Cho--CPN