The Great Search Disruption

For decades, digital search relied on presenting users with a list of links based on their queries, often requiring users to sift through numerous sources to find the desired information. However, with advancements like ChatGPT, the paradigm is shifting towards conversational search, where users receive direct answers to their questions. Companies like Microsoft, Google, and Vectara are capitalizing on this trend, with Vectara introducing its Grounded Generation and vectara-answer projects to enhance this experience. Vectara's AskNews application exemplifies this new approach by aggregating news from multiple sources, providing summarized answers with citations, and supporting cross-language queries. The vectara-answer project represents a shift in how users interact with information, focusing on comprehension, explainability, and question recall, and encourages the community to explore and develop new conversational search applications.