Answer Engines, Search Engines & Cultural Impact
Answer Engines like Perplexity and Startpage are early, but changing the very nature of how we search. They likely won't replace search engines. Would could be their cultural impact?
In terms of internet time, search engines are ancient things. Dominated today by Google with Bing and Yahoo! (which uses Bing) hanging on for dear life. As privacy concerns by consumers mounted, a privacy first search engine, DuckDuckGo arrived. There’s also Startpage and Searx. But as answer engines arise, things could get very different.
While it is unlikely that search engines are going away entirely, answer engines could have a profound impact on digital culture and thus, the real world. From how and where we seek information, to how we understand reality and potentially creating less variety in human cultures.
An answer engine serves up just that, answers, as opposed to search engines which just provide links to information. It sounds simple but it’s actually very complicated. An entire industry sector arose from search engines with the disciplines of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). These two skills are already undergoing profound changes.
Perplexity AI was the first major answer engine to hit the market and recently, competitor OpenAI of ChatGPT fame, has created their own answer engine. Microsoft does this with Copilot on Bing, which uses ChatGPT.
It’s a lovely idea, an answer engine. It also lends itself very well to voice as a UX for both asking for and receiving answers. Some propose voice will become the primary way we interact with digital tools. My consumer research suggests otherwise. The more likely outcome is not a single dominant form of UX, but rather a mash up based on context and the situation at hand.
The risks of answer engines are important for us to understand as it will mean a need to evolve how we teach children to think and process information, from elementary through to university. Answer engines can be very alluring and with instant answers, we may think less critically and we may not question the answers we are given.
We may too, lose some of our memory skills as our minds offload that work to the answer engine. This can impact us later when we are in situations where we can’t access the answer engine or we need to rely on our memory to get something done or solve a problem. Education systems, in some ways, have not adapted well to the digital age. Largely because of cultural norms and traditions which take a very long time to change. Although new approaches are being developed in some jurisdictions.
Another challenge is of course, dealing with hallucinations and disinformation. People may not know when the answer they receive is wrong by design or by hallucination. This is a challenge that will need to be solved by the use of both technology and social governance.
Too, as I mentioned above, we may find greater global cultural homogenization as a result of creating common ways of understanding information at scale. This may include the loss of some smaller cultural communities and impact languages and local dialects. But those situations exist today and have for thousands of years.
At the same time, if we do have a more common platform for the understanding of information, this could also help us understand cultural differences and communicate better. Humans use storytelling as a form of organisation information in a way to communicate and organise. Stories help bring us together and perhaps that could be an important advantage to answer engines.
Some have suggested that search engines are doomed to extinction. I don’t think so. It’s more likely that they will evolve and be a mix of search and answer engine, much like Bing is already doing. We may even get highly complex mixes designed for researchers and more intense needs.
But just as search engines have had a profound impact on culture globally, from economics and politics to social organisation, so will answer engines. We can make some educated guesses as to how, but we can’t make any solid predictions.
Search engines took a while to have global impacts. This won’t be so with answer engines, as search was a predecessor and many societies around the world are comfortable and familiar with using search engines. The arrival of answer engines is, in anthropology, what is called the Ratchet Effect, the evolution of culture and technologies can be applied to this process.
So answer engines will likely impact global cultures much faster than search engines along with the other digital technologies and AI tools within that ecosystem. Fascinating times!