The history of digital technology illustrates how the players who transform access to information redefine uses and challenge the established dominants.
From Yahoo to Google: the evolution of the Web
By the late 1990s, Yahoo had a dominant position on the Internet. The group offered a portal combining news, electronic messaging, directory and search engine; for a period, Yahoo used Google technology to power its results. Despite this collaboration, two strategic decisions contributed to its decline: the choice not to fully invest in search technology, favoring a media portal model, and the refusal to acquire Google when the opportunity presented itself.
Google followed a different trajectory, focused on the quality, speed and relevance of results. The company optimized indexing and ranking, simplified its interface and developed a set of services — Gmail, YouTube, Maps, Android — that solidified its place as the primary access point to the Web. In a few years, Google replaced Yahoo in this role.
Google facing the conversational model
Twenty years later, Google, the dominant player in online search, finds itself confronted with a new paradigm: the conversational assistant powered by generative artificial intelligence. OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Atlas, a version capable of performing real-time web searches, analyzing multimodal data and providing advanced reasoning.
Unlike traditional search engines, ChatGPT Atlas provides synthetic, contextualized and interactive answers. The user can interact, refine their queries and directly obtain usable results, rather than being satisfied with a list of links.
From research to understanding: a change of use
The conversational nature profoundly changes uses: the user no longer needs to browse multiple pages to obtain a summary, he receives a structured response adapted to his context. This shift transforms the very logic of access to information, favoring understanding and active assistance rather than simple indexing.
The historical parallel is enlightening: in the 2000s, Google was able to position itself by offering a different approach to access to the Web, which gradually broadened its uses. Today, OpenAI, with ChatGPT Atlas and its conversational features, offers a complementary model that further transforms the way we access knowledge.
The issue is not limited to technological competition: it concerns the ability of players to support and adapt to changes in digital uses. Google understood this very well, having diversified its offering very early on by developing its professional side… a strategy followed very closely by young digital shoots!
