Will a New Paradigm Replace Search?

Originally published in Chinese on December 17, 2024. Two candidates come up when people ask what could replace the search engine: Perplexity, the AI answer engine, and Xiaohongshu (RedNote), China's lifestyle content platform. This note looks at both. Search is likely to be deconstructed to some degree. How fast that happens, and what kind of product replaces it, is still unknown. Where search engines stand The wide habit of getting information through search engines still exists to a degree, and people depend on the habits search engines trained. Every product has a search input box. Once the user system is taken into account, the core question is whether the search box is the product's own capability or an open one. In the past, the product's own capability meant content it built itself, while the delivery of services relied on open support. Google and Baidu, for example, provide indexing for many products and services. Whether a search engine could be replaced by a new paradigm depends on many elements. For Xiaohongshu, several have to hold.