Google outlined at the 2023 I/O conference how AI will come to its search engine.
The AI version of Google Search is called Search Generative Experience, and it will open up to the first users “in the coming weeks,” Google explains in a blog post.
It uses Google’s large language model tech and will populate the top part of your search results. The feature will collate information from multiple sources into prose similar to what you might see from a chatbot.
Google’s demo includes someone asking which e-bike they should buy. The Search Generative Experience displays links to recommendations made elsewhere on the web — which look like the sponsored ad slots you might see when searching for products today.
Google describes this as AI coming “front and centre” instead of working in the background, as it has done to date.
The company also suggests AI will be able to handle the kind of complicated questions you might ask one of the recent chatbots, but not a search engine.
Its example question is: “What’s better for a family with kids under 3 and a dog: Bryce Canyon or Arches?”. This reads like the kind of thing you see asked on a forum.
AI search versus chatbots
How is this different from today’s chatbot experience? Some chatbots, such as the publicly available version of ChatGPT, have knowledge up to only a certain point in time. Google’s AI search will naturally be powered by newly published content as well as older articles.
This AI tech will come to the US first, in both the Chrome browser and the Google app on iOS and Android. In this early stage, you will have to sign up at the Google Labs website to give it a try. We in the UK are out of luck for now.
The company continues to address AI large language models’ tendency to make stuff up as it did with the Google Bard chatbot. It says on its website that “there are known limitations with generative AI and LLMs, and Search, even today, will not always get it right”.
This move to incorporate generative AI into web searches is more tentative than Microsoft’s approach, though. In February, Microsoft announced the “AI-powered Microsoft Bing”. When using Bing through the Edge browser, you will already see a Bing Chat box containing generative results alongside more conventional web search listings.
However, Google’s vision for AI search as presented in its Search Generative Experience sees the AI component take precedence over traditional search results. This is likely to have a huge impact on how many people actually visit the websites Google AI search collates its information from.
There is no word on when Google’s Search Generative Experience will be available for UK folks to try out. However, is is likely to be released first as part of the Google Labs beta tester programme.
