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There has been a ‘fundamental shift in how people are using Google’, according to a top tech boss at the firm.
You may be sick of hearing about AI, but it’s here to stay, and is getting increasingly harder to avoid.
Sitting down with Metro, Robby Stein, a VP in search, said uptake showed users are on board with the company’s shift towards features using it, even though it can be notoriously prone to errors.
These shifts aren’t confined just to the search bar, with big changes coming to the Google Chrome internet browser, such as a virtual assistant to ‘handle those tedious tasks that take up so much of your time, like booking a haircut or ordering your weekly groceries’.
Last week, tech firms pledged to invest £31 billion in the UK’s development of artificial intelIigence. Among those splashing out is Google, who plan to invest £5 billion over the next two years.
Have you started using AI to search?
The company opened its first UK data centre, Waltham Cross in Hertfordshire, last week to coincide with Donald Trump’s state visit, and its London-based AI research centre DeepMind will benefit from investment.
But the most visible changes to most users will be to its search engine, which is by the world’s most popular by far.
Mr Stein said we are at a ‘profound moment’ in how people are using search.
It’s no longer just a case of googling your own name to see what comes up, or typing ‘how to screenshot on Windows’ (still not quite sure though, will no doubt be googling this again).
In July, the company started rolling out an AI-powered search option, where you can ask detailed queries and get an answer powered by its Gemini chatbot.
Many users had already started migrating their search queries to apps like ChatGPT, preferring the more detailed, multi-pronged responses they were getting.
This must have caused some consternation, and now you can do it on Google too, switching between AI and standard search modes.
This is different to the AI Overviews, which appeared last year, and were far from universally popular.
The main problem is that an answer generated by AI may sound polished and legitimate, but could be wrong or even totally made up, as hallucinations are a common issue with the tech across platforms.
In one infamous case, a Google AI overview said drinking two litres of urine was a good way to treat kidney stones… so it’s always best to check the source material.
It’s undeniable that the ability to search for extremely specific topics can be helpful, though.
Giving the example of solo travel, Mr Stein said searches around this have shot up even from just a year ago, which could partly be explained by search being more helpful in this area.
It’s now possible to ‘ask anything’, he said: ‘You can say “this weekend with a group of five friends, I want outdoor seating, I want to be able to have barbecue, I want to be able to be walking distance to this music festival down the street”: It will handle all of that now.’
What would a Google search expert search?
Giving an example of something you can now search that was previously impossible, Mr Stein said: ‘You can take a picture of your bookshelf and ask something like, “here’s my bookshelf of books I’ve never read. What should I read?”
‘We have best in class visual recognition understanding. It will segment each book out, convert them to text, do all this research. It can put them in a table, put the reading time and number of pages next to each book, and sort the table by the ones that had, for example, the best overall review score.
‘This is a question that literally you couldn’t even ask in Google a year ago, and now it just works.’
He said the difference between doing it in Google Search as opposed to asking any LLM, is that Google has built up a vast catalogue and knowledge of the web in its 27 years so far as a search engine.
What about other websites then?
If you can find so much information without leaving Google, websites which previously would have provided these details could lose out – and this is a concern.
Data from Digital Content Next last month showed traffic to ‘premium publishers’ was down 10% year-on-year over an eight week period, after AI overviews were rolled out. The Colombia Journalism Review went so far as to call it the ‘Traffic Apocalypse’.
Mr Stein didn’t agree that the search engine would become a dead end for users: ‘Google continues to send billions and billions and billions of clicks out to publishers and websites all over the world and we’re not seeing that changing.
‘We don’t believe you should take anyone one’s word for anything: Google is about connecting you to the world and to the web.’
AI mode uses a new method of search called ‘query fan out’, which is when each manual search prompts dozens of related searches by AI.
With such major changes to the workings under the hood, I wondered what this would mean for SEO practices, and if key words would still be as important.
‘Best practices for creating great content that works well on search and that people want to find are still largely applicable,’ Mr Stein said.
Is old style search dying out?
Until now, the experience of using Google has not been that different to what it has been for years. You type your query in the box, and a ‘list of links’ comes back.
According to Mr Stein, this isn’t going away, and the new options are just ‘expanding’ the possibilities: ‘It just turns out that people had a lot more questions than that they were asking, and you can unlock those by enabling these kinds of AI experiences.’
Despite that, there will clearly be a move to push AI search more and more, and it’s already the default for some users in the US.
Writing on X, Mr Stein seemed to downplay the suggestion by another exec that AI mode could become the default ‘soon’.
The new Chrome browser will let users search in AI mode automatically from the ‘omnibox’ (that’s the web address bar to you and me).
But you can still do it the old school way tooat least for now.
Different ways to search
As well as AI mode, there has also been big growth in the numbers of people using visual search, with Google Lens, and Circle to Search, a feature on Android phones which allows users to look up anything on their screen by drawing a circle around it without switching apps, such as someone’s jacket they like on Instagram.
Google said visual searches are up 65% year-over-year, with more than 1.5 billion people using it every month for things such as translation and shopping.
Demand for visual search is not just within Google: Pinterest offers a similar option to search for specific aspects of an image within the app, allowing users to get inspired with parts of an outfit such as similar shoes, for example.
Younger users are the most likely to be branching out with different ways of searching; those aged 13 to 24 who have access to Circle to Search start their searches with this feature 10% of the time.
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