Sources: The Verge
According to The Verge, Google said it believed AI was the future of search. That future is apparently already here: Google is starting to roll out AI Summary formerly known as Search Generative Experience, or SGE to users in the US and soon around the world. Soon, billions of Google users will see an AI-generated summary at the top of many of their search results. And that is just the beginning of how AI is changing search.
What we see with generative AI is that Google can do more of the searching for you, says Liz Reid, Google is new head of Search, who has been working on all parts of AI search for the past few years. It can take a lot of the hard work out of searching for you, so you can focus on the parts you want to do to achieve your goals, or the parts of exploration that you find interesting.
Reid rattles off a list of features aimed at making that happen, all of which Google announced publicly on Tuesday at its I/O developer conference. Of course, there are AI overviews, which are meant to give you a general idea of the answer to your query along with links to resources for more information. There is also a new feature in Lens that lets you search by capturing a video. There is a new planning tool designed to automatically generate a travel itinerary or meal plan based on a single query. There is a new AI-powered way of organizing the results page itself so that when you want to look at restaurants in a new city, it offers you plenty for a date night and plenty for a business meeting without you having to ask.
This is nothing short of a full-stack AI-ification of search. Google is using its Gemini AI to figure out what you are asking about, whether you are typing, speaking, taking a picture, or shooting a video.
It is using a new specialized Gemini model to summarize the web and show you an answer. It is even using Gemini to design and populate the results page.
Not every search needs this much AI, though, Reid says, and not every search will get it. If you just want to navigate to a URL, you search for Walmart and you want to get to walmart.com. It is not really beneficial to add AI. Where she figures Gemini can be most helpful is in more complex situations, the sort of things you’d either need to do a bunch of searches for or never even go to Google for in the first place.
Over most of the last decade, Google has been trying to change the way you search. It started as a box where you type keywords; now, it wants to be an all-knowing being that you can query any way you want and get answers back in whatever way is most helpful to you. You increase the richness, and let people ask the question they naturally would, Reid says. For Google, that is the trick to getting even more people to ask even more questions, which makes Google even more money. For users, it could mean a completely new way to interact with the internet: less typing, fewer tabs, and a whole lot more chatting with a search engine.
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