Is ChatGPT a threat Google? Obviously there’s nothing I can write about ChatGPT that hasn’t already been written 400 times, so this post is a sort of “naive plagiarism”. Still, with that in mind…

Where do you go first when you want an answer to a problem? This week I wanted to rewrite some old vb code (of which I am thoroughly ashamed) in C#. I didn’t want to do it from scratch so I looked for a tool to do the first draft.

In the past, my process for figuring out how to do this would be as follows:

1️⃣ Do a Google search on something like “How do I convert vb code into C#?”

2️⃣ Look at the top few search results and pick one or two. Often based on brand awareness or the bit of ad copy that they’ve written. In this example, https://converter.telerik.com/ appears at the top and I clicked through to have a look at their offering. Sometimes this will be an organic result sometimes it will be a paid for #ppc ad – and of course this is how Google make a lot of their money

3️⃣ So like most people my first port of call for a question is just to type it in the browser which then uses Google

4️⃣ But I noticed this morning that I’ve started doing something different. I’ve started asking questions in ChatGPT *before* I type it into the browser. Instead of a Google search I typed “Convert the following code into C#” into ChatGPT.

5️⃣ The results were excellent (see below)

6️⃣ The point here is not about how to update code to C#. The point is how we get answers to questions. Google has completely dominated this scene for a long time. But will it continue to do so? For the first time ever, for certain types of questions, I’m starting with ChatGPT then occasionally falling back on Google search.

So the good thing about this as a user is that we’re getting back to a world where great content wins rather than just the winner being the company with the best marketing team. But what if you’re a marketer??

And as soon as someone has a chrome plugin to change the default search to ChatGPT – then this starts to get interesting. In fact I’d be amazed if there wasn’t already something out there. I’m going to start hunting now, and you know where I’m going to start…

PS This whole article was inspired by https://lnkd.in/e9_JBcs7.