The explosion of LLMs has given the search engine space a real shake up. Bing integrating ChatGPT into its engine was the moment that we could all see the early signs of genuine disruption in the search engine industry. People are excited by AI; people are excited with the opportunity of accessing pure intelligence via their devices. Search is moving into this direction, bringing us to the advent of the Answer Engine.
What is an Answer Engine?
An answer engine aims to give the internet user an instant answer either in the form of a ‘featured snippet’ or an AI-generated embed such as AI overviews in Google or Microsoft CoPilot in Bing.
In the earliest stages of search, we craved an instrument to access the world wide web. We wanted to find websites and web pages – struggling through search results without Google wasn’t easy! It was wonderfully naïve, similar to ChatGPT users logging on for the first time in November 2022.
Ask Jeeves
During this era of search, a quirky engine appeared named ‘Ask Jeeves’. Users were enticed to ask questions and the user interface would provide web content to answer questions. Google had an admiration for Ask Jeeves, which rebranded to Ask.com and provided them with early inspiration in this area.
When you look at the ‘assistant’ direction of AI, the branding of Ask Jeeves was ahead of its time and paved the way for Google to take the technology to a new level enabling them to deliver on the answer engine consumer promise.
Google Hummingbird
Google’s Hummingbird update in September 2013 paved the way for stronger intuition of the user search. The enormity of Hummingbird shouldn’t be ignored in documenting Google’s relentless development to keep well ahead of other search engines. At the time, ex-Googler Matt Cutts explained to the SEO community that Hummingbird was a complete core algorithm rewrite, allowing the search engine to focus on topical relevance through a better understanding of context.
Rich snippets
Google has been a pioneer of the answer engine user experience when it comes to non-ecommerce / commercial search queries. In 2016, we saw the introduction of ‘rich snippets’, where Google uses its index to show bespoke results that might give the user the answer they need. For example ‘Instant Answers’ or ‘People also ask’ are FAQ based results that reduce the need to leave Google for quick responses to questions that you may have.
We are now seeing SERP features like ‘featured snippets’ play second fiddle to the new kid on the block: AI Overviews.
AI Overviews and Co Pilot
Bill Gates believes that the race to create the personal assistant is truly on. An AI powered personal assistant would reach well beyond search and would most probably create a layer over search as we know it. That’s the sell: no more trawling of web results.
This is why Bing now has Co Pilot and Google has AI Overviews. Microsoft and Google wanted to be positioned as the assistant at the earliest stages of AI’s mass adoption. The search engine marketing community have watched this innovation closely, with Bing getting the first mover advantage via its partnership with OpenAI. The surge in excitement that ChatGPT has created led to a spike in Bing’s popularity during 2023 which has since subsided in terms of search engine market share. Google’s AI Overviews is now getting impressions in Europe following the U.S launch in May 2024 amidst heavy criticism in mainstream media.
As mentioned above, AI Overviews is being triggered for informational queries above elements like featured snippets – see the example below:
Perplexity AI
Perplexity AI have deliberately positioned themselves as an ‘answer engine’, as opposed to a potential Google killer in the search engine market. In a recent interview with Lex Friedman, CEO Aravind Srinivas explained that they are providing something that Google does not want to provide: answers for every query. They have ‘made a bet’ on LLM technology, that the exponential improvements result in fewer hallucinations and offers the consumer a consistent user journey by not taking the bulk of the clicks to external websites that vary in quality. Srinivas has a view that Google and Perplexity (or other answer engines) could co-exist because Google’s use case of accessing the web is still valid.
Where will we gravitate to for answers?
We will see huge technological shifts in marketing in coming years and search is certainly something that will not be overlooked. There is clearly a ‘personal assistant’ race which overlaps with the growing concept of the answer engine.
Why is this so important?
It is fair to say, Google’s dominance has never been more threatened in terms of being the number 1 place for informational search. It is also fair to say that we might not yet have seen the new kid on the block that becomes the leading answer engine.