Google has spent the past 25 years teaching us to speak its idiom. If you barked at your spouse “weather Des Moines tomorrow,” you’d be unlikely to elicit anything resembling a helpful response. Yet that’s the way we’ve learned to engage with Google Search. Now, with the advent of a host of artificial intelligence technologies, the search giant wants to teach the world a whole new way of talking to computers.
At Google I/O—the company’s annual developer conference, held on May 10 near its headquarters in Mountain View, California—we caught our first glimpse of its vision for integrating generative AI into search. It’s a big deal, not least because Microsoft Corp. has painted a target on Google’s back. Through its investment in ChatGPT creator OpenAI, Microsoft has been integrating AI tools into its own search engine, Bing. For the first time in two decades, it’s started to look as though there might be a meaningful challenge to Google’s $163 billion search business.
More than that, it was unclear what a generative AI-led approach to search would mean for Google’s ability to serve ads, from which that business derives all its revenue. After all, it’s the imperfection of search that creates space for advertisements: You’re served a diverse menu of choices. If you received the perfect result each time, there would be less scope for Google to make money by giving you results someone else might have paid for.
