Google reveals ambitious plans to revolutionize search with AI

Google Search is in the midst of a "journey" around artificial intelligence, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said during the company's earnings conference call on Tuesday, UNN reports citing TechCrunch.

Details

"As AI continues to expand the universe of queries that people can ask, 2025 will be one of the biggest years for search innovation," said Pichai.

He laid out the next phase of Google's plan to power search with AI features from the company's DeepMind research lab. The Google Search product, as outlined, is gradually becoming more like an AI-powered assistant that browses the Internet for you, crawls web pages, and returns an answer.

This is far from a simple search engine that provides ten blue links, the publication writes.

Google, as noted, has been going down this path for several years now, ever since the search giant was caught off guard by the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT in 2022. This shift has huge implications for websites that rely on Google traffic and companies that buy ads on Google Search.

Not everyone is happy, but Google is moving forward, the publication notes.

Asked about the future of AI and search, Pichai said that "you can imagine the future with Project Astra," referring to DeepMind's multimodal AI system that can process live video from a camera or computer screen and answer users' questions about what the AI sees in real time.

Google also has big plans for the Astra project in other areas of its business. The company says that one day it wants the multimodal AI system to use a pair of smart augmented reality glasses, for which Google will create an operating system.

Pichai also mentioned Gemini Deep Research - an artificial intelligence agent that takes a few minutes to create long research reports - as a feature that could dramatically change the way people use Google Search. Deep Research automates the work that people have traditionally done with Google Search. But now it looks like Google wants to do that research for users.

"You're really expanding the types of use cases that search can work for significantly - things that you can't always get an instant answer to, but might take some time to answer," said Pichai. - "These are all areas of research, and you'll see us bringing new capabilities to users throughout 2025.

Pichai also said that Google has a "clear idea" of what kind of search experience it can create with another Google AI agent, Project Mariner. This system can use the interface of websites on behalf of users, making it unnecessary for people themselves to use the websites.

The Google CEO also said that there is an "opportunity" to allow users to interact more and ask clarifying questions with Google Search. Pichai did not go into details, but it seems that Google is considering ways to make its Search interface more like a chatbot.

"I think the [Search] product is going to grow even more," Pichai said. - "As you make it easier for people to interact and ask additional questions and so on, I think we have an opportunity to drive further growth.

Addendum

Today, ChatGPT has grown to become one of the most used products on the Internet with hundreds of millions of weekly users. This poses an existential threat to the long-term business of Google Search. To solve this problem, Google is not only creating a competing AI chatbot with Gemini, but also implementing AI features directly into Search, the publication notes.