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, The Verge reported.
“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,”
According to The Verge, 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’s 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 different way to interact with the internet: less typing, fewer tabs, and a whole lot more chatting with a search engine.
Google posted: “Generative AI in Search: Let Google do the searching for you” written by Liz Reid, VP, Head of Google Search.
Over the past 25 years, across many technological shifts, we’ve continued to reimagine and expand what Google Search can do. We’ve meticulously honed our core information quality systems to help you find the best of what’s on the web. And we’ve built a knowledge base of billions of facts about people, places and things – all so you can get information you can trust in the blink of an eye.
Now, with generative AI, Search can do more than you ever imagined. So you can ask whatever’s on your mind or whatever you need to get done – from researching to planning to brainstorming – and Google will take care of the legwork.
This is all made possible by a new Gemini model customized for Google Search. It brings together Gemini’s advanced capabilities – including multi-step reasoning, planning and multimodality – with our best in class Search systems.
ArsTechnica reported Search is still important to Google, but it soon will change. At its all-in-one AI Google I/O event Tuesday, the company introduced a host of AI-enabled features coming to Google Search at various points in the near future, which will “do more for you than you ever imagined.”
It’s not AI in every search, but it will seemingly be hard to avoid a lot of offers to help you find, plan, and brainstorm things. “AI Overviews,” the successor to the Search Generative Experience, will provide summary answers to questions, along with links to sources. You can also soon submit a video as a search query, perhaps to identify objects or provide you own prompts by voice.
In my opinion, the new AI-enabled Google search might help some people to complete their projects, plan a trip, or look up their favorite bands. My hope is that Google’s AI feature will be useful to those who need it.