The triage of AI search
Thoughts on human-AI co-performances
The Generative AI news of the week is all about the AI search engine war that seems to be starting to happen. I had to think about that other big shift in searching the web; the Google moment, and wondered if we are at the type of paradigm shift in digesting the information and knowledge the internet (in the broadest sense) is offering.
Back in the day, the shift was from expert-driven selection to the wisdom of the crowd. Google added PageRank as a new filtering mechanic and a new way of trusting that it would find the right things that fit your real question. It was inspired by academic referencing but made accessible to the rest of us.
But with the inevitable role of the internet in finding information for everything, especially the e-commerce angle, the systems started biting their tail and slowly breaking down the trust. Google mixed too many paid advertisers into the mix, and the search engine optimization as marketing became too dominant.
And now we are entering AI search. Perplexity paved the way, breaking down some holy houses (a Dutch expression; check the translation at OpenAI search), and this week, OpenAI is daring to enter that playing field. Meta also announced that it will be building its version.
There will be a discussion about trust in the results, hallucination, how referencing works, and the functionality compared. But I think looking at the new paradigm shift here is more interesting.
We can no longer rely on PageRank for manipulation by Google and professional search engine optimization companies. And 20 years later the world became even more complex, and the digital information as a source untameable. That is the fertile ground for AI search, where inferring and machine learning assist us in filtering the right answers. With the capabilities of real-time machine learning combined with the proven power of a natural conversational style, we can now execute these tools.
There are caveats, though. The question of how human and AI power will be combined is not played out yet. In this research paper, the human-AI partnership is valued in different categories. It seems that humans using AI are not the best at adding value to collaboration, and also the other way around. When the goal is a creative process, the collaboration of the two improves the results.
So, is search a creative result? That depends on what you are looking for. If you are still not sure about what your question is, more of a hunch than a specific need, that is a clear fit for AI search. But that is a different search than finding the cheapest offer for your next vacuum.
These differences should be integrated into the new search functionality. The first action the AI search performs is not a search but a triage on what type of search is intended and starts a conversation about that. Depending on the type of question, traditional search can be used, or new capabilities of generative AI are mixed into the results and formulation to help out.
The rise of AI search is inevitable, let alone that people using AI tools are probably already doing it. That makes the OpenAI’s move potentially smart; try to filter the questions based on expectations and choose the type of ‘tool’ to provide the answer.
One question remains open: how will the commercial search results become integrated? PageRank made Google big and a dominant player, and then commercial interests started breaking down relevance. To prevent this with AI search, we should start developing a new user experience paradigm to have the offerings found by the user in an honest conversation. Can the AI search work in the user's interest and not in the interest of the search engine provider? Can we break free from being the product and become the user in the mix…
This weekly “Triggered Thought” is written as part of the Target is New newsletter, which offers an overview of captured news from the week, paper for the week, and interesting events. Find the full newsletter here.
About the author; Iskander is particularly interested in digital-physical interactions and a focus on human-tech intelligence co-performance. He chairs the Cities of Things foundation and is one of the organizers of ThingsCon. Target is New is his “practice for making sense of unpredictable futures in human-AI partnerships”.