by Charles Miller

I once read a story describing how a company's board of directors went about deciding the name for a new car model. The marketing department proudly presented to the executives a volume of about 4,000 available names, all market tested and copyright-free. The exasperated execs responded: "We don't want 4,000 names, we just want ONE!" Then they decided to name their new car the Edsel.

That story comes to mind as I am asked to explain the difference between a search engine like Google's, and a chatbot like ChatGPT. A search engine finds loads of information. Until recently the Google search page would display a "hit count" along with its search results. Most users have probably failed to notice the omission of that line reading "About 25,100,000 results (0.43 seconds)" while searching. Google must have realized most users do not want to see 25 million search results, and few users ever look past the first page or two of results anyway. This is probably the most obvious difference between a search engine and a chatbot, but that is not to say there are a lot more differences in the two different technologies.

A search engine, such as Google or Bing or Yahoo, is designed to find web sites containing the key word(s) for which you are searching. It does this by indexing billions of web pages so that when you enter a query, it searches its vast index to return many results… often way too many. It is still up to you to wade through pages and pages of "hits" matching your query where hopefully you will find the right answer.

A chatbot is designed to interact with the user by chatting in a conversational manner, providing one single answer (usually) that is supposed to be responsive to your question while encouraging a back-and-forth chat to further improve on the answer you are seeking. It does this by searching through the Large Language Model (LLM) curated database on which it has been trained. The LLM does not necessarily include all the vast quantities of data found on the internet, moreover; it can reflect certain specializations and/or biases of the programmers.

That is not to say that search engines are completely unbiased. They use algorithms and ranking factors to determine which pages show up first in your search. A whole industry of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has grown up catering to businesses that want their web page to come up in your search results before their competitor's web page. SEO specialists can and do manipulate search engine results, just as the programmers who train chatbots can introduce their own biases into the responses ChatGPT presents to your questions.

The question of whether to use a search engine or a chatbot is not a question of right versus wrong, or which is better. Instead, it is fortunate we all have a choice as well as the opportunity to compare one service to the other.

Many search engines now do a good job of recognizing natural language, so you can ask questions in complete sentences. With that thought in mind, point your browser to Google, Bing, or Yahoo search engines, and then compare the result of a search you receive there to ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, or Amazon Alexa to see which response you prefer.

By the way, when using the Google search page, you can still see the number of hits found in the database, but now it is hidden from view. Near the top of the Google page you should find a [Tools] button and if you click on that you can see how many thousands of hits Google found that matched your search query. Personally I still like the option of seeing many different search results because when ChatGPT presents only one answer, that answer sometimes turns out to be a sleek shiny new Edsel.

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Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

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