TetraMesa

Search Tools in a GPT World

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I’ve always enjoyed search, both as user and builder. So from a product perspective, I’ve been fascinated by its evolution and the recent fires lit under the traditional tools thanks to the ascendence of AIs. This will be a three part series. First, Search Tools in a GPT world, then business models, and lastly, how traditional search might respond.

So… How might the “traditional” Search industry evolve in the face of AI GPTs? Let’s take a historical tour to consider some customer pain points and values that various tools deal with and how these are morphing. It’s not as simple as GPTs are better search and it might be useful to consider other technology shifts. Did Video Kill the Radio Star? Maybe. But video didn’t kill radio. At least, not completely. Yet. OK, yes, perhaps the shift decimated revenues, but niche use cases survived through both television and even through more recent digital streaming. Even satellite radio was also able to find a place. Will the information retrieval industry experience something similar with what’s been billed as an even more disruptive technology? Or is this truly something radically different if we consider this shift on the level of industrial revolution?

Will the future of Search follow a similar path? Perhaps somewhat, but maybe not quite the death blow some have suggested given there seem to be a lot of niche values for Search. AI driven GPTs, (Generative Pre-trained Transformers), are already changing the search landscape. But their evolution is not as simply obvious as “this is a better search” for at least two related, but separate reasons. First, GPTs can likely excel past traditional search for a wide variety of use cases. But perhaps not all. And second, GPTs can and are used for significantly different use cases than search.

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How Badly Will the GPTs Kick Google’s Teeth In

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Notice I didn’t ask “if” newer Artificial Intelligence tools like Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs) will impact Google. I asked “How badly.” While Google isn’t going anywhere, these new tools will chip away at its search market share and perhaps overall value. Google and parent company Alphabet develop properties from mobile operating systems to devices like Nest and Fitbit, Waymo autonomous driving, cloud services, and more. Still, advertising from search, YouTube and their network was almost 80% of their revenues in 2023. Google’s dominance remains and its advertising revenue is still its golden goose. However, GenAI tools introduce a serious competitive threat to the core search business. How badly will Google feel the impact?

Here’s a high level summary of the main points, after which I’ll try to defend each.

  1. Basic Search Needs: AI GPTs are increasingly satisfying basic search needs. While not perfect, they meet many use cases where users are seeking answers; not links to maybe answers.
  2. AI Stickiness: GPTs offer capabilities beyond search, encouraging users to stay in that space. Even with some of the challenges with AI accuracy, people may stick with a “good enough” solution.
  3. GPTs are Improving: These tools are rapidly evolving, fueled by intense investment and innovation.
  4. Google Is Somewhat Stuck: Google’s brand is so tied to traditional search that pivoting may alienate users or undermine its core business.
  5. Everyone is Attacking from Multiple Vectors: Yes. OpenAI’s ChatGPT may have been the alarm bell, but there’s a whole lot more coming; both consumer and business.
  6. Business Use Cases beyond advertising: People are paying premium prices.

That’s the tl;dr. Stop here. Or if you want the backup rationale behind these points, continue…

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Prompt Engineering: What It Is and Isn’t

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Is Prompt Engineering just an overly fancy way of saying, “Here’s a better search query?” Maybe it should just be called Search 2.0? True enough, the output of an AI large language model is more than just a bunch of results, but the query itself is still ‘just’ an instruction of sorts, right?

In some cases, yes, it’s essentially the same as a fancy query. But mostly not. There are obvious differences in the use cases for prompts using AI Large Language Models (LLMs) vs how keywords get used in traditional search engines. And for all their potential faults and risks, LLMs can provide stunning new capabilities across a variety of use cases. At the same time, there seems to be some overblown expectations as to what prompts can do. For example, at least in some places, a misunderstanding that prompt engineering can make models better. While it may be true that prompts and responses can be iteratively honed and fed back into the fine-tuning of models to actually make models better, for the most part, they’re not used this way. I’d like to try to clear this up because I think it’s important we understand how we can use our tools and where they’re limited. Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the handful of folks who really are evaluating prompt output to adjust models. (If you’re one of those folks, you’re ideally operating more at the data science kind of level of prompt engineering.) For our purposes here, I’m talking about the typical consumer or business use that seems to have some people believing prompt input alone changes how the models themselves work.

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Information Architecture: LATCH Is Not Enough

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from Craiyon.com AI image generator Keywords-information-architecture

Richard Saul Wurman has been called the father of information architecture. And properly so given that he not only coined the term, but also came up with – among many other things – the acronym of LATCH to describe some core information organization possibilities. So it’s with some trepidation I dare to suggest extending his model. And yet, with time has come our collective experience of dealing with more varied forms and volumes of information via digital channels for which the base model seems dated.

TL;DR version: The LATCH model of information organization includes the following aspects: Location, Alphabet, Time, Category and Hierarchy. It is, however, missing at least the following: Ordinal/Numeric, Distance, and Random. As well, the model lacks depth when it comes to faceted metadata and purpose-focused organization schemes. Okay. That’s it. You’re done. Unless you want to really dive in…

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Customer Journey Map Template

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While working on a new component of a project, I had occasion to build out a Customer Journey Map. Even though I’ve done this several times before, I’d kind of just cobbled together a map using Omnigraffle or LucidChart or some other drawing program. But this time I had to do a few of them and wanted a more common format template. What I found was a ton of examples in image search, but very few usable editable templates. (There were a few behind some paywalls and seemingly sketchy download requirements, but not much else.)

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Finding Web Page Publish Dates When Not Displayed-Part-2

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Welcome to Part 2 of Finding Web Page Publish Dates when they’re not displayed on a page. Why would you care? Well, you have your reasons. Please see Part 1 of this topic to get a sense of why we’re bothering to look at this stuff.

In any case, continuing then…

  • See if images have a date stamp.
    • Click on an image or right click and open in a new window. See if the URL has a date stamp on it.
    • A more extreme option might be to look at image info to see if there’s EXIF data in the image with a date. This doesn’t necessarily tell you much as the image could have been taken any time. Maybe it’s years old stock photography.

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Finding Web Page Publish Dates When Not Displayed Part 1

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In an earlier post, I expressed by own annoyance when certain types of sites choose to not display publish dates on their web pages. And how this is especially annoying when it’s an article that presumes to be talking about current statistics or other aspects where knowing the date context is useful. My goal in that post was to convince any publishers who might happen across the article as to the value of including the date. (Here’s the link to: Should You Put Dates on Blog Posts and Articles?)

This blog is mostly geared towards the Product/Business side of things. But today, it’s more for end users, whom of course may be business users with the need or just desire to find publish dates of content.  I’d like to try to offer web users, surfers, researchers, whatever your self-identifying characteristic may be, some techniques to try to find content publish dates when they’re not clearly provided. These methods are not necessarily accurate, precise, or at all reliable. But they may be all you’ve got.

Why does this matter? Well, it might not. The assumption here is that there are certain types of content, (business research for example), where knowing the date is important enough to warrant the effort to look into the publish date, and possibly the last modified date. [Read more…]

Should You Put Dates on Blog Posts and Articles?

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Good vs. Bad IdeasThis is an old argument. Which I had hoped was mostly coming down on the side of keeping dates in, even though there are allegedly still potentially SEO benefits to leaving them out due to Google’s “Freshness Algorithm.” Supposedly, this was adjusted sometime around 2015 to fix this problem. (The problem being people playing SEO games with content publish dates regardless of impact on end user value.) One recent research task I was performing landed me on a variety of blog and lower end news sites that had chosen to not put visible publish dates on their articles. (We’ll leave aside the old issue of just what is ‘blog’ vs. ‘news’ site.) So I looked into this a bit and it seems there’s still info out there suggesting lack of dates is a good idea. Maybe it is in some special cases. But I think mostly not; at least from a user perspective.

This is a User Experience issue that screams, “I don’t care about users’ needs.” If you’re a Product person or Publisher that’s running a site where you’ve chosen to not display the publish date, please take moment to consider the following… [Read more…]

Website Speed is a Feature

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Speed Dial

Your login functionality is a feature. Your social sharing buttons are

features. Your core product offering itself has who-knows-how-many features. But what about your website’s speed? Given that research has shown slow website speed, (whatever slow might mean to some users), can hurt you in terms of abandonment and lost sales when there’s any sales involved, shouldn’t speed be considered a feature? That is, maybe website load time shouldn’t be just a “tech thing” that kind of gets done as a matter of course. Rather, it should be a core measurement given that it’s demonstrably a driver of other Key Performance Indicators. (KPIs.)

How bad is the problem?

Following are a couple versions of a chat about Speed I put together for a Udemy.com course I built for Digital Product Management. The ideas are so important though, I’ve extracted these as free segments because the more people that spread this word the better.

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More Most Annoying Ecommerce Mistakes – Part 1

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We’re Really Still Here?

After so many years in digital commerce, we still see what I think I’ll call “average practices” in surprising places.

I’ll admit I’m not a typical user or digital product manager. Probably from having been in this business for some time, I’m just amazed at some of the things I still see  brands doing online. (Or not doing.) William Gibson, the guy who first used the term “cyberspace” in print once said, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” This certainly seems true of Best Practices in ecommerce. [Read more…]

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