I’ve noticed something somewhere between asking Google’s new advanced AI to explain in detail how to become an expert birdwatcher in my neighborhood and how to use Google’s new AI MovieMaking tool to create a crime cartoon fighting a 4-pound Chihuahua. I am, I am, as Google is in a midlife crisis. It could be both.
Although Google has been very public since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, things got even more serious last fall when it released ChatGPT Search, a direct competitor to Google Search. Last week, Google announced 100 new things at its I/O developer conference, most of which joined AI. Suddenly there’s a new story. The search giant certainly has a midlife crisis, and “glorious,” said an industry expert.
I’ve been tinkering with Google’s new AI tools over the past week, and I can confidently say that the company is somewhere between crisis and glory. It can take years to know which passes will win.
Google has dominated not only the way we use the web, but also the very existence of the web over the past 15 years, primarily through our search and advertising departments. As AI breaks into every corner of the digital experience, it is not clear which companies will control or how they will interact with the next era. It is almost certainly not possible to enter keywords into search engines.
To find something online today, you usually enter some keywords into Google, select and click on the blue link you think you have the information you are aiming for. The company has powered Google’s multi-billion dollar advertising business and bid on search terms to get ads in front of people browsing the web. Click helps you make money from advertising hosted on your site by publishers, including VOX. Google is dominant enough, with two federal judges recently deeming it operating as an illegal monopoly, and now the company is waiting to see if it will dissolve.
As AI breaks into every corner of the digital experience, it is not clear which companies will control or how they will interact with the next era.
However, the government may not be the biggest threat to Google’s control. AI has shattered the web foundations over the past few years. People have been turning more and more into tools like ChatGpt and confusion to find information online. These AI chatbots pull information from the website and present a neat summary. This has really been a threat to Google, with the number of Google searches in Safari falling for the first time in April. Recently, Google saw its first market share of the search market is under 90% in 10 years as AI searches begin. Tiktok doesn’t help either.
Google has recognized this inevitability several years ago and is trying to reinvent itself accordingly. A few years ago, I developed an overview of AI. This is a summary of search results created by Gemini, Google’s large language model. Google then expanded its concept using AI mode earlier this year. This is a chatbot-based search experience, with gemini, and looks terrible like ChatGpt and confusion. The company announced last week that AI modes will be rolled out to everyone in the US over the next few weeks. Find a sparkly button to the right of the search field with the words “AI Mode” written on it.
AI mode is the way I tried to learn birdwatching last week. Instead of plugging in keywords into the old Google search box, I’ve been typing complex queries and retrieving detailed reports. From one 3-character prompt, AI mode returned almost 600 words. There were only nine links to the source, but there were no clicks needed because the chatbot had already summed up its content. Only by digging into it a bit has been realized that one of the main sources of this summary is a beginner’s guide to birdwatching, written by Vox colleague Allie Volpe.
This search experience isn’t necessarily great, like with other AI chatbots. The technology has a large-scale language model that is hallucinated prone to hallucination, so these new search tools tend to be unreliable. Again, AI tends to write such persuasive copies, so it’s not necessarily compelling you to reaffirm your results. Publishers have seen a significant decline in traffic from Google as more people bypass the web and seek information from AI chatbots. As we learned from bird watching research, it’s faster. Honestly, everything you find from clicking on the blue link is not 100% accurate.
This is probably what the future of search looks like, and no, it almost certainly doesn’t include a list of blue links.
I’m worried about admitting I like the new Google. And I hope to see more of it. As part of the blitz that announced AI, Google has deployed Gemini on Chrome. This allows the AI assistant to see what they are seeing on the website. (It is only available to people currently subscribe to Google AI Plus or AI Ultra Plans, or running the beta version of Chrome.) You can ask questions about what the page is, or ask Gemini for a summary of the article. This tool also allows you to analyze YouTube videos in real time. This can almost be thought of as a more targeted version of what the new AI mode search experience does across the web.
This is probably what the future of search looks like, and no, it almost certainly doesn’t include a list of blue links. While you’ll definitely get access to traditional search experiences for quite some time, the vast amount of Google’s latest announcements suggests that AI is where we’re headed. Headlines around that news reflected all of its gravity. Reporting from Google’s developer meeting, Platformer’s Casey Newton said, “It’s all changed, it’s normal, scary and cold.” Thanks to Google, tech analyst Ben Thompson has declared “ad-supported web death.” John Herman of New York Magazine said it more frankly: “Google is filling the web with vitality.”
As Geoffrey A. Fowler of the Washington Post points out, Chaionte, the early web, became popular for simplifying the intimidating task of finding things online. Its advantage in this new AI-powered future is far less certain. Maybe another startup will come in and this time simplifies things, so you can explain things to you, book a trip for you, and make a movie for you.
In the meantime, I’m trying to complete my Chihuahua cartoon fighting my generated crime.
This version of the story was also featured in a user-friendly newsletter. Sign up here and don’t miss out on what’s next!
