The Rise of the Post-Search Era: How AI is Transforming Digital Interaction

Simone Puorto explores the transformative potential of AI in reshaping digital interactions, heralding the advent of a "post-search" era. Using examples like Netflix and TikTok, he illustrates how AI-driven personalization is replacing traditional search methods by predicting user preferences and delivering relevant content proactively. This shift towards AI-centric interfaces, exemplified by tools like ChatGPT and Claude, suggests a future where conversational AI becomes the primary medium for accessing web information, integrating various data sources seamlessly. Such a development could render traditional websites and apps obsolete, leading to a more unified, intuitive, and human-like digital experience. Puorto envisions this evolution as a significant leap in how we interact with the web, moving from fragmented searches to holistic, AI-driven interactions that align more closely with natural human behaviors.

In recent years, we have been evolving towards what I call a “post-search” era. Take Netflix as a paradigmatic example. With a catalog of thousands of titles and a highly diverse user base, it is almost mandatory for them to offer not only hyper-personalized title suggestions but also to propose them in an equally hyper-personalized manner. A particularly effective strategy the video streaming company uses is the customization of artwork used to represent the content. Personalizing not only the titles based on tastes but also how those titles are presented allows Netflix to maximize the click-through rate and, consequently, the time spent on the platform. It's unsurprising that, according to McKinsey, as much as 75% of the content viewed on Netflix today comes from algorithmic recommendations rather than active and conscious searches (source: How retailers can keep up with consumers)

No longer "search," in short, but "post-search." This trend is evident, though to a lesser extent, in e-commerce. Today, the most successful companies are not those with the most content but those capable of offering that content in a more finely calibrated way, focused not so much on position but prediction. The validity of this thesis can be empirically proven by the growing dominance of platforms like TikTok in the field, not only of social media but also of search itself. The AI heart of TikTok, Monolith, tailors content increasingly suited to user preferences. Once we overcome a first wave of generic content, as we interact with Monolith, the algorithm begins to reward us with increasingly relevant results, to the point of making Facebook seem more like a mass media platform than a social media platform in comparison. It is no coincidence that in recent years, there has been a change in user preferences, especially among young people, who increasingly tend to favor platforms such as TikTok and Reddit for their searches, to the detriment of Google.

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