{"id":186184,"date":"2024-03-27T22:31:10","date_gmt":"2024-03-28T03:31:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/03\/heres-why-ai-search-engines-really-cant-kill-google"},"modified":"2024-03-27T22:31:10","modified_gmt":"2024-03-28T03:31:10","slug":"heres-why-ai-search-engines-really-cant-kill-google","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/03\/heres-why-ai-search-engines-really-cant-kill-google","title":{"rendered":"Here\u2019s why AI search engines really can\u2019t kill Google"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

But the thing you have to understand about a search engine is that a search engine is many things. For all the people using Google to find important and hard-to-access scientific information, orders of magnitude more are using it to find their email inbox, get to Walmart\u2019s website, or remember who was president before Hoover. And then there\u2019s my favorite fact of all: that a vast number of people every year go to Google and type \u201cgoogle\u201d into the search box. We mostly talk about Google as a research tool, but in reality, it\u2019s asked to do anything and everything you can think of, billions of times a day.<\/p>\n

The real question in front of all these would-be Google killers, then, is not how well they can find information. It\u2019s how well they can do everything Google does. So I decided to put some of the best new AI products to the real test: I grabbed the latest list of most-Googled queries and questions<\/a> according to the SEO research firm Ahrefs and plugged them into various AI tools. In some instances, I found that these language model-based bots are genuinely more useful than a page of Google results. But in most cases, I discovered exactly how hard it will be for anything \u2014 AI or otherwise \u2014 to replace Google at the center of the web.<\/p>\n

People who work in search always say there are basically three types of queries. First and most popular is navigation, which is just people typing the name of a website to get to that website. Virtually all of the top queries on Google, from \u201cyoutube\u201d to \u201cwordle\u201d to \u201cyahoo mail,\u201d are navigation queries. In actual reality, this is a search engine\u2019s primary job: to get you to a website.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

But the thing you have to understand about a search engine is that a search engine is many things. For all the people using Google to find important and hard-to-access scientific information, orders of magnitude more are using it to find their email inbox, get to Walmart\u2019s website, or remember who was president before Hoover. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":578,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[418,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/578"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}