Search is dying, use ChatGPT plugins.

Many people are saying that AI powered search will be the future. It is not. With the announcement of ChatGPT plugins, if you are still thinking that search will be important in the future, then you are still in the old mindset.

Search is only a bridge between the old fashion web interface, and the new AI powered language interface. Search gives AI access to the traditional web. But what will really empower AI is the plugin based language interface. One important component that will play a key role is the information retrieval plugin open sourced by OpenAI.

Imagine you are a website owner, you could sit still and let AI powered search to crawl and understand your website. Or you can provide your own plugin that makes use of the information retrieval plugin provided by OpenAI, to serve your well-indexed contents when ChatGPT decided to use your plugin. The former one is passive, and the later one is active. Search is non-deterministic, but plugins are well formatted and is easier to understand by AI. Over time, ChatGPT will certainly choose plugins over searching. After all, why will anyone perform a non-deterministic search while you have a better information source?

Search is dying. But of course, it won't die immediately. As the plugins system is still in an early stage, we are still going to rely on our old friend for a while. When ChatGPT is able to search through its plugins and find the best answer for you, the only reason you may want to search is to explore. But why exploring by yourself when you can explore with ChatGPT over its plugin systems? I am pretty sure that soon enough OpenAI will allow you to ask ChatGPT to recommend plugins to you when there are too many plugins in the store. (If they are still using a search box to let you find a plugin in the store, I will be deeply disappointed.)

Added on Mar 26: The plugin system is definitely a well planned move. It builds a whole ecosystem around their AI language interface. And of the plugins they released, the information retrieval plugin is the most impressive one for me. By open sourcing this plugin, they avoided the burden of caching the whole internet, and also returned the responsibility of indexing your website back to you. Plus, they also default the use of their embedding API, so they can make more money down the line. What a master move!