Google Search is about to fundamentally change, for better or worse. To align with Alphabet-owned Google’s grand AI vision and driven by competition from AI startups like ChatGPT, the company’s core product is being reorganized, becoming more personalized and much more abstracted by AI.
At Google’s annual I/O developer conference today in Mountain View, California, Liz Reid showed off these changes, setting her mark early on in her tenure as Google’s new head of all things search. (Reid has been at Google for just 20 years, where she has worked on a variety of search products.) Its AI-soaked demonstration was part of a larger theme throughout Google’s keynote, led primarily by CEO Sundar Pichai: AI now underpins nearly all of Google’s products, and the company only plans to accelerate that change.
“In the Gemini era, we think we can make a lot of improvements in search,” Reid said in an interview with WIRED before the event, referring to the flagship generative AI model launched late last year. “People’s time is valuable, right? They face difficult things. “If technology has the opportunity to help people get answers to their questions and take more work off their hands, why wouldn’t we want to take advantage of that?”
It’s as if Google took the chips from the script it’s been writing for the last 25 years and tossed them into the air to see where the cards might land. Also: the script was written by AI.
These changes to Google Search have been a long time coming. Last year, the company created a section of its Search Labs, allowing users to try out new experimental features, for something called Search Generative Experience. Since then, the big question has been whether and when those features would become a permanent part of Google Search. The answer is, well, now.
The overhaul of Google search comes at a time when critics are becoming increasingly vocal about what some consider a degraded search experience, and for the first time in a long time, the company is feeling the heat of competition, coming from the massive combination between Microsoft and OpenAI. Smaller startups like Perplexity, You.com, and Brave have also ridden the generative AI wave, garnering attention, though not significant engagement yet, for the way they’ve restructured the entire concept of search.
Automatic responses
Google says it has created a custom version of its Gemini AI model for these new search features, although it declined to share information about the size of this model, its speeds, or the barriers it has implemented around the technology.
This search-specific spin on Gemini will power at least a few different elements of the new Google Search. The AI overviews, which Google has already been experimenting with in its labs, are probably the most important. AI-generated summaries will now appear at the top of search results.
An example from WIRED’s testing: In response to the question “Where is the best place to see the Northern Lights?” Google, instead of listing web pages, will tell you in an authoritative text that the best places to see the northern lights, also known as the northern lights, are in the Arctic Circle, in places with minimal light pollution. It will also provide a link to NordicVisitor.com. But then the AI continues barking underneath that, saying, “Other places to see the Northern Lights include Russia and Canada’s Northwest Territories.”