Google updates Search product with new AI capabilities as rivals swarm
Google (GOOG, GOOGL) debuted some of the biggest changes to its Search product in years at the company's annual I/O conference in California on Tuesday as upstarts like OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) and Perplexity (PEAI.PVT) seek to take its search crown.
The tech giant is bringing its ChatGPT competitor AI Mode to all US users, adding high-powered AI models to its standard AI Overviews, and debuting new agentic capabilities that allow Google to do things like search for and prepare purchases for tickets to events on your behalf.
Google's AI Mode, a dedicated chatbot-style search option, will now be available from the standard Google Search page alongside tabs like Images, Videos, and News. The offering was previously only available in Google's Labs test mode.
AI Mode uses Google's frontier models and takes advantage of what the company calls its "query fan-out" technique. The method, Google says, breaks down your queries into smaller subtopics, running a number of separate searches at the same time. That, Google explains, allows AI Mode to perform deeper searches than traditional Google Search.
AI Mode won't give you a classic list of blue links, though. Instead, you'll get your results via a kind of back-and-forth conversation with the service. AI Mode will also offer a Deep Search option, which uses the same fan-out technique that AI Mode does, but performs hundreds of those smaller searches, giving you far more detailed results. The company says the feature can churn out an 'expert-level fully-cited report' in minutes, which it claims will save users hours of research.
According to Google vice president of product for search Robby Stein, Google will also begin to use the same models that power AI Mode to provide results in the company's AI Overviews found at the top of standard Google Search results, similar to how you'll see images or videos at the top of certain results.
'If you type in a specific question, and it's really hard, a bunch of these new modeling breakthroughs will just start running in the background to help power AI Overviews,' Stein told Yahoo Finance.
'So we'll always make sure that if you type something into the regular Google Search box, we'll bring you the most helpful reply across everything we have at Google, whether it's AI, Images, Finance, Maps, anything.'
According to Stein, AI Overviews now has 1.5 billion monthly users and is available in 200 countries and territories in 40 languages.
'What we're seeing is that … people are asking different kinds of questions and that for these questions … we're seeing 10% growth in those kinds of queries in the biggest markets like the US and India, which makes it the largest search launch this decade,' Stein said.
Google is also debuting its Search Live feature, which allows you to use your phone's camera to ask questions about live video you capture in real time. You'll be able to access Search Live via AI Mode or the Google Lens app by tapping the Live icon and immediately be able to ask the apps questions about what the camera sees.
In one example, Stein explained how a user could show an engineering project of a bridge made of popsicle sticks and ask how they could make the bridge stronger. Search Live responded by telling the user to add more triangular structures to the miniature.
It's the type of feature that could help people in real-world situations. You could imagine a world in which Search Live can show you how to put together furniture or explain how to change your car's spark plugs.
According to Stein, Google Lens, like AI Overview, now has 1.5 billion monthly users, and visual searches more broadly are up 65% year over year.
Google is also bringing the agentic AI capabilities of its Project Mariner to AI Mode. Project Mariner is Google's agentic AI prototype designed to allow AI bots to perform actions on your behalf.
The tech industry is leaning heavily on agentic AI as the next generation of AI capabilities that will power everything from enterprise applications to consumer software. Microsoft on Monday laid out its own vision of what it calls the agentic web during its Build conference in Seattle.
Google's agentic functionality will allow you to do things like ask AI Mode to find you two affordable tickets to a baseball game. AI Mode will then run through the process of finding the best price for tickets, fill out your information in any necessary order forms, and serve up the purchase menu.
All of these improvements come as Google looks to ensure it holds on to its place as the global leader in search. A pair of federal judges found that the company operates illegal monopolies in both the search and online advertising industries.
Now the Department of Justice is seeking to dismantle Google's businesses, including potentially forcing it to sell its Chrome browser.
During a recent hearing related to the DOJ's case against Google's search business, Apple (AAPL) senior vice president of services Eddy Cue said the iPhone maker saw its first decline in search queries in the company's Safari browser in April. Google is the default search option for Safari, a part of a $20 billion-a-year deal between the tech giants.
Cue attributed the decline to consumers opting to use AI search options like ChatGPT. But Google has pushed back against the claim, saying its search traffic continues to grow on Apple devices.
Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on X/Twitter at @DanielHowley.
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Though Claude's poetic framing was a very close contender. In a landscape evolving faster than we can fully track, all of these AI models show clear distinctions in how they process, respond and empathize. Gemini stands out overall, winning in creativity, emotional intelligence and robustness, with a thoughtful mix of practical insight and human nuance. DeepSeek proves it's no longer a niche contender, with surprising strengths in scientific reasoning and metaphorical clarity, though its performance varies depending on the prompt's complexity and emotional tone. Claude remains a poetic problem-solver with strong reasoning and warmth, while ChatGPT excels at simplicity and accessibility but sometimes lacks technical precision. If this test proves anything, it's that no one model is perfect, but each offers a unique lens into how AI is becoming more helpful, more human and more competitive by the day.
