AI chatbots vs search engines: How they are different

If you’ve been using chatbots like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot lately, chances are your prompts looked something like “What’s the tallest mountain in the world” or “How tall was Mahatma Gandhi”. A couple of years back, we would have asked these very questions to search engines like Google, Yahoo or even DuckDuckGo.

However, with apps like ChatGPT or Copilot being able to answer all these simpler queries on your smartphones, are chatbots the same as search engines? Not really. Here’s a look at the differences between search engines and AI-powered chatbots.

What is a search engine?

Search engines like Google or Bing are online programmes that use the web to search for results based on the queries you type. Search engines can return multiple results based on what you’re looking for, where every result is a hyperlink to a website or webpage.

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The key aspect here is that search engines help you to find, and not create. While Google can help you find a hundred templates on the web on how to type an essay, it cannot find a specific kind of essay tutorial if it doesn’t already exist. This is where AI chatbots come into the picture.

What is an AI chatbot?

AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot are programs that use Large Language Models (LLMs) to understand a language, instead of simply finding the words you type on the internet. Chatbots can understand queries and respond accordingly, often with actual responses rather than links to other webpages.

As a result, chatbots cannot just find information, but have the ability to create. You can use chatbots to create sentences, copies, poems, essays or even entire books.

What is the difference between AI chatbots and search engines?

Because of the ability to actually understand language instead of simple matching, chatbot prompts can be much more complex and descriptive. So, instead of scouring through a hundred essay templates, chatbots allow you to simply prompt them to “create a template for a 1000-word essay on creative uses of paper for heat-relief in a hot and humid city.”

While AI chatbots and search engines can be used interchangeably in many instances, there are use-cases where one makes more sense over the other.

When to use search engines: Search engines are still the best way to get information quickly and in real-time. So, if you want to know how late your flight is running, what’s the current price of the iPhone 15 Pro in your country, or when the next Manchester City match is, a search engine like Google may be able to help you, while a chatbot will not be able to. Search engines are also ideal when you’re looking for particular webpages, images or videos on the internet, as you can get links, something chatbots cannot provide.

When to use AI chatbots: AI chatbots are ideal when you want to create documents, images or other elements rather than find existing ones. So chatbots are great for creating short-format or long-format writeups, recipes, or even entire travel itineraries, as long as none of these require any form of real-time information.

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Note that there are some chatbots like Google’s Gemini which are linked to the internet, and don’t rely on a fixed database. Such chatbots work closer to search engines and are capable of fetching real-time information. However, even these can’t simply point you to websites or webpages with links the way search engines could.

These are some major differences between search engines like Google and chatbots like ChatGPT. We hope this blog helped you address any confusions between the two, and also gave you a basic idea of when to use which of the two.