I previously wrote about the future of search back in 2022 when first writing about TikTok. Noting how traditional search could be replaced by an AI that tracks what you do online and then serves up targeted results based on your clicks and movements. And now we could have another new version of search. One that spruces up traditional search with AI instead of replacing it with something different.
The Verge sums it up best:
“A year ago, Google said that it believed AI was the future of search. That future is apparently here: Google is starting to roll out “AI Overviews,” previously known as the Search Generative Experience, or SGE, to users in the US and soon around the world. Pretty soon, billions of Google users will see an AI-generated summary at the top of many of their search results. And that’s only 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’s newly installed head of Search, who has been working on all parts of AI search for the last few years. ‘It can take a bunch of the hard work out of searching, so you can focus on the parts you want to do to get things done, or on the parts of exploring that you find exciting.’
Reid ticks off a list of features aimed at making that happen, all of which Google announced publicly on Tuesday at its I/O developer conference. There are the AI Overviews, of course, which are meant to give you a general sense of the answer to your query along with links to resources for more information. There’s also a new feature in Lens that lets you search by capturing a video. There’s a new planning tool designed to automatically generate a trip itinerary or a meal plan based on a single query. There’s a new AI-powered way to organize the results page itself so that when you want to see restaurants in a new city, it might offer you a bunch for date night and a bunch for a business meeting without you even 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’re asking about, whether you’re typing, speaking, taking a picture, or shooting a video.
It’s using a new specialized Gemini model to summarize the web and show you an answer. It’s 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’s 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.”
Google’s developer conference made headlines for some of its weird and wacky moments, for becoming the real life version of Hooli from Silicon Valley when they unleashed the Kracken in the form of an unhinged DJ (not Erlich).
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But the work they did to improve search should be taken seriously. We’ll just have to wait and see if people like using it and if it’s enough to hold off OpenAI, TikTok and any other existential threat to search that arises.
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Has the future of search arrived?
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