Google Search Has To Innovate or Die

Google when it first came out as a search engine was innovative in so many different aspects from search engines that preceded Google. From better ranking algorithm over simply counting keywords, cleaner UI with no banner ads or popups, rather than trying to keep users on their website Google just provided a better search experience overall.

We can debate on how the quality of search results changed over time,

• with Pinterest, and Medium article spam, and content farms spamming Google results,
• Google trying to keep users within Google with the information box,
• Google introducing news articles and ads to their clean home page, slowly taking us back to the old Yahoo days.

But the point that I want to emphasize in this post is not the quality of Google search or search results, but Google is going to get hit by maybe the next innovation of search, which is AI / LLM-based search engines.

Gone are the days when you have to click on 10 links in a search engine and read through pages to find the right answer. [source]

Would you rather spend time searching, trying to craft the best Google query, skimming through 10 titles, and clicking through 1-2 links to find what you need,

or

use an LLM search engine like Perplexity AI, that will summarize multiple sources and craft the answer with resources if you want to clarify or read more about it? saving you so much time.

Think about it for a second, and let me know what you think @justruky

The most important thing in the above review for me is that Perplexity saves 70%-80% of the time of the user who posted the review, and that's exactly what Google did when it first came out over Yahoo and others. That it provided answers quickly and saved time, and time is a commodity that people will value over anything else.

And if there is something that can save time over Google search, then people will choose that over Google. Not overnight, not in a year, but that change will happen and that is inevitable unless Google innovate and make the next leap in search.

Now I see more and more people using ChatGPT on their smartphones to find answers, and I see my colleagues using Perplexity at work, who convinced me to try Perplexity (which I've been trying as my main search engine for a week and see how it goes, I also installed Perplexity on my phone).

Google has so many different products at the moment, I don't think Google will ever go away, and that's why I put search in the title. I hope Google will turn things around, and hopefully innovate as they once did a decade and a half ago, and come up with something better, or just be like Skype and miss the opportunity to become Zoom.