Social media’s potential as the king of search

THOSE of us old enough will remember the days when the choice of search engines was at an all-time high. There was Webcrawler, AltaVista, Excite, the good old Ask Jeeves, and many more, before Google came along and changed the game with its relevance algorithm.

Google has dominated the space ever since, but new developments have increasingly threatened its position as the king of search.

Microsoft has launched a new version of Bing in beta, powered by an upgraded version of the artificial intelligence (AI) technology that fuels OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Google is, of course, responding with its own plans around Bard, its AI-powered platform that’s also set to change the way we search for things online.