The internet search wars are back.
The emergence of AI systems capable of generating direct textual answers to questions — most notably the ChatGPT chatbot created by San Francisco-based OpenAI — has opened the first new front in the battle for search dominance since Google fended off a concerted challenge from Microsoft’s Bing more than a decade ago.
Google and Microsoft are both close to announcing revamps of their search engines to include direct answers supplied by artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, several search start-ups have already embedded AI in their services, giving the first glimpse of how the technology behind ChatGPT might transform one of the biggest online markets.