Language models like GPT-3 could herald a new type of search engine

Now a team of Google researchers has published a proposal for a radical redesign that throws out the ranking approach and replaces it with a single large AI language model, such as BERT or GPT-3--or a future version of them. The idea is that instead of searching for information in a vast list of web pages, users would ask questions and have a language model trained on those pages answer them directly. Search engines have become faster and more accurate, even as the web has exploded in size. AI is now used to rank results, and Google uses BERT to understand search queries better. Yet beneath these tweaks, all mainstream search engines still work the same way they did 20 years ago: web pages are indexed by crawlers (software that reads the web nonstop and maintains a list of everything it finds), results that match a user's query are gathered from this index, and the results are ranked.