Google is adding more AI to its search, assuaging doubts that the company losing market share to competitors like ChatGPT and Perplexity. It is rolling out AI-powered overviews to users in the U.S., Google said at its Google IO 2024 developer event on Tuesday. Additionally, the company is also looking to use Gemini as an agent for things like trip planning.
Liz Reid, head of search at Google, said that the company has built a custom Gemini model for search to combine real-time information, Google’s ranking, long context and multimodal features.
AI overviews
Google has been testing AI-powered overviews through its Search Generative Experience (SGE) since last year. Now, it is rolling out to “hundreds of millions of users” this week in the U.S., with the intention of making it available to over a billion people by the end of the year.
“We’ve heard that users find search more helpful than ever. At this point, we’ve served billions of queries. And what we hear again and again is that people like this combination of insights, mixed with the ability to dive deeper to hear from human perspectives and different authoritative sources,” Reid said about combining AI and traditional website results.
There has been a lot of criticism about AI-powered search changing the way the web and websites work and how it will affect businesses and journalism. Google mentioned that during the test period of its AI overview feature, the company observed that people clicked on a greater diversity of websites.
Reid mentioned that users won’t see AI overviews when traditional search is sufficient to serve results. She said that the feature is more useful for queries that are more complex and information is scattered.
Using Gemini’s agent capabilities
Google also wants to use Gemini as an agent to complete tasks like meal or trip planning. You would be able to type queries like “Plan a meal for a family of four for three days” and get links and recipes for these three days.
“We’re also looking at planning; planning is an area where, whether you’re planning a trip or planning for a party, there’s typically a lot of fun involved. But there’s also a lot of work involved for that. And so we’ve been asking the question, how can we take the work out of the planning for you?” Reid said.
The company is also using Gemini to organize search results pages with different elements based on the query.
There are plenty of posts about using ChatGPT as a meal planner. Companies like Booking.com, Kayak and, most recently, Expedia have introduced AI-powered features for trip planning. Startups like Perplexity and Arc browser maker The Browser Company are trying to build a new version of search that will give you contextualized and summarized search results. Google is trying to tackle all these phenomena by making its search results page more dynamic.
