Google is re-engineering its iconic search page to put LLM-powered search front and centre for users. Announced at the company’s I/O conference last week, the familiar space where users typed their enquiries is to get replaced with an “intelligent search box” that may place users every now and then right into a conversation with Gemini.
Instead of the familiar list of links that Search has yielded since the search engine’s inception in 1997, users is likely to be encouraged to ask follow-up questions that can help them refine the terms of what they’re in search of, the company says. The familiar ‘blue links’ won’t entirely disappear, but will likely be given less priority than LLM-generated responses in the future.
The latest interface brings ‘vanilla’ search closer to what users have been experiencing to an increasing degree over the last couple of years in the type of AI Overviews (through which web sources’ contents are summarised by Gemini) and AI Mode, where users can converse with a chatbot to seek out the information they need.
Google may even offer the use of LLM agents that may track changes on the web and report back to users if information is updated. This is an evolution of Google Alerts, a service that notified users of defined changes in search results corresponding to a price change on a spread of desired items or breaking news in a selected area. Users will give you the option to make use of “information agents” that work in the background, combing relevant web pages in keeping with criteria defined by the user, without manually checking back with the Alerts service.
Liz Reid, Google’s head of search, said in a press conference, “You could […] track market movements in a selected sector with very specific parameters, and the agent will map out a monitoring plan for you, including the tools and the data it must access. It will then keep track of those changes and let you understand when the conditions are met, and supply a synthesised update with links and knowledge you possibly can dive into further.”
The company says AI Overviews are utilized by greater than 2.5 billion times a month, with one billion monthly users of AI Mode. To place those figures in perspective, every day Google search volume is estimated to be 13.7 billion searches per day – thus, 0.85% of Google Search users actively engage in the engine’s LLM-powered services every month.
The new-look Gemini-powered search interface is because of begin appearing this week, and the Antigravity-powered agentic facilities will arrive later this 12 months.
“Part of the reason we deal with delivering frontier models […] is because we wish to bring [them] to as many individuals as possible,” Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, said in a press briefing ahead of the Google I/O conference.
The new-look search box and generative UI will each be free to make use of for all users, with background agentic search and notifications rolling out to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers later this 12 months.
Google has also said that its Gemini Spark ‘personal assistant’ (currently in beta) is now available to pick Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US, and can enter production status soon.
Marketing functions that rely heavily on traditional search engine marketing may need to extrapolate from Google Search’s recent progress, through which the search giant’s impetus appears to have three goals:
- to maintain users on the Search page or inside the Google portfolio,
- to present information without necessarily directly referencing sources in the type of external links,
- to present large language models’ interpretations of sources as answers to a growing ratio of total queries.
If we interpret OpenAI and Anthropic’s top-down, gradual moves to token-based billing as a practical response to the cost of coaching and running AI models, it seems inevitable that providing frontier models at no cost (or at low subscription rates) will develop into a thing of the past. However, unlike OpenAI and Anthropic, Google has additional lines of profitable business that may support Gemini as a loss-leader. These most up-to-date changes from the search giant are likely, subsequently, to each progress in depth and stick around.
(Image source: Pixabay, under licence.)
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