Ask AI or just Google it? Google makes a big change to a little search box : NPR

Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai speaks at the tech giant’s annual I/O Developer Conference May 14, 2024, in Mountain View, California. Google said on Tuesday it would introduce AI-generated answers to online queries made by users in the United States, in one of the biggest updates to its search engine in 25 years.

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Google is changing what Google means.

The company this week announced significant changes to its search box, the austere, single-line input field on its home page that has been the world’s most popular entry point to the Web for about two and a half decades.

The new version looks like the old single-line text box, but it’s dynamic and expands with longer queries. Users can also drop in videos, images and files for what Google calls “multimodal” search.

Behind the scenes, a bigger change is underway. Google is merging artificial intelligence and traditional web search in a move that Liz Reid, who oversees search at Google, said brings together “the best of the web and the best of AI.”

Critics say deeper integration of AI into search risks further muddying the waters around where information gleaned from the web comes from and could disempower users. A chatbot is likely to return a summary with only a few links to further information, unlike a web search which returns many pages of links.

But the shift is, in some ways, unsurprising, given Silicon Valley’s decisive shift toward AI, with Google and others investing billions in the technology and refocusing corporate strategies around it.

For about a year, Google has been putting “AI Insights» – short summaries – at the top of some search results. “What we’ve seen with the AI ​​previews is that people don’t just want AI or the web. They want a mix of both,” Reid said.

She said she noticed that users started asking longer questions, with more natural language, rather than fragments or keywords. “They’re asking the question they’re really asking,” Reid said.

For Google, this potentially opens the door to new understandings of user intentions. “If you start using more natural language, if you have a conversation, when you go from research to purchase, you’ve kind of indicated it. So we can run better ads because we understand what it is,” Reid said.

Google is also introducing agentic functionality to Search, so users can ask it to perform tasks over time, such as searching for theater tickets at regular intervals, sending a notification to shoppers when something is on sale, or performing a weekly internet scan for local events.

Carolina Milanesi, an independent technology analyst, said Google was trying to make its cash cow business — search — richer and more personalized, and that would make shopping easier. But there is a risk that users will have fewer choices about what to click on.

“Right now it’s: I ask a question, I get a bunch of answers, and I feel like I’m in control of the answer I take, or if I’m looking for something, the product I end up buying. That’s going to be less the case in the future,” she said.

Milanesi envisions AI-powered search and agents offering products to consumers — perhaps even the ones they requested — but with less clarity or choice about where they come from.

“If you say, ‘I want a pair of Jordans, go get them,’ you’re not necessarily sure what steps were taken and whether the AI ​​used a source or store that was paid for and therefore showed up in the search results,” she said, “or whether the AI ​​actually did its due diligence and chose the best one for me as a customer.”

Sarah T. Roberts, director of the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry at UCLA, said the algorithmic underpinnings of Google’s web search results have long been “by design, impenetrable to end users” and are not simply the best of the web floating at the top of a given search. Adding AI will only make the system more opaque, she said.

“What’s happening now with AI is that this complexity that already existed will be even more obscured and even more difficult to understand,” she said.

She noted episodes in which Google’s AI provided poor results, notably advising to put stick in pizza and eat stones. “These blunders should not be forgotten as Google makes this transition,” she said.

And critics say getting more Google users to switch from web searches to interacting with AI will exacerbate the risks of so-called “Google Zero” scenariowhere the growth of AI queries kills web search and stifles the Internet click economy as we know it. This includes online stores, web advertisers and news agencies who all rely on Google-referenced traffic.

Although the redesigned box is the same for all Google users, there are various tips And advice online for people who want to disable or avoid certain AI features when using Google.

Google financially supports NPR.