What is Google even for anymore?
is a senior technology correspondent at Vox and author of the User Friendly newsletter. He's spent 15 years covering the intersection of technology, culture, and politics at places like The Atlantic, Gizmodo, and Vice.
Somewhere between asking Google's new advanced AI to explain, in detail, how to become an expert birdwatcher in my neighborhood and using Google's new AI moviemaking tool to create cartoons of my 4-pound Chihuahua fighting crime, I realized something. Either Google is having a midlife crisis or I am. It could be both.
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I've spent the past week tinkering with Google's new AI tools, and I can confidently say the company is somewhere between crisis and glory. It may take years before we know which path wins.
Google has dominated not only the way we use the web but also the web's very existence for the last 15 years, mainly through its search and advertising divisions. As AI encroaches on every corner of our digital experience, it's not clear which company will dominate the next era or how we'll interact with it. It almost certainly won't be by typing keywords into a search engine.
To find something online today, you typically type some keywords into Google, pick a blue link that you think has the information you're after, and click. Companies bid on search terms in order to get their ads in front of people browsing the web, powering Google's multibillion-dollar advertising business. Your click helps publishers, including Vox, make money from ads they host on their sites, many of which Google manages. Google is dominant enough that two federal judges recently ruled that it's operating as an illegal monopoly, and the company is currently waiting to see if it will be broken up.
As AI encroaches on every corner of our digital experience, it's not clear which company will dominate the next era or how we'll interact with it.
The government might not be the biggest threat to Google dominance, however. AI has been chipping away at the foundation of the web in the past couple of years, as people have increasingly turned to tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity to find information online. These AI chatbots pull information from websites and present you with a tidy summary. This has become a real enough threat to Google that the number of Google searches in Safari fell for the first time ever in April. Google also recently saw its share of the search market dip below 90 percent for the first time in a decade, as AI search takes off. TikTok isn't helping either.
Google recognized this inevitability a few years ago and has been trying to reinvent itself accordingly. A couple years ago, it rolled out AI Overviews, which are summaries of search results created by Google's large language model, Gemini. Then Google expanded on that concept earlier this year with AI Mode, a chatbot-based search experience also powered by Gemini that looks an awful lot like ChatGPT and Perplexity. The company announced last week that AI Mode will be rolling out to everyone in the United States in the coming weeks — just look for a sparkly button on the righthand side of the search field that says 'AI Mode.'
AI Mode is how I've been trying to learn birding for the past week. Instead of plugging keywords into the old Google search box, I've been entering complex queries and getting back detailed reports. From one three-sentence prompt, AI Mode returned nearly 600 words. There were just nine links to sources, none of which I needed to click, since the chatbot had already summarized the content therein. Only by doing a little bit of digging did I realize that one of the main sources for this summary was a beginner's guide to birdwatching written by my Vox colleague Allie Volpe.
This search experience, as is the case with other AI chatbots, is not always awesome. The technology is powered by large language models, which are prone to hallucinations, and so these new search tools tend to be unreliable. Then again, because AI tends to write such convincing copy, you're not always compelled to double-check the results. Publishers are seeing huge declines in traffic from Google as more people bypass the web and ask AI chatbots for information. As I learned from my birding research, it's quicker. And let's be honest, not everything you find from clicking a blue link is 100 percent accurate either.
This is probably what the future of search looks like, and no, it almost certainly won't involve a list of blue links.
It's unnerving for me to admit that I like the new Google. And I expect to see a lot more of it. As part of its blitz of AI announcements, Google also rolled out Gemini in Chrome, which lets the AI assistant see what you're seeing on a website. (It's currently only available for people who subscribe to Google AI Plus or AI Ultra plans or for people running beta versions of Chrome.) You can ask questions about what's on the page or ask Gemini to summarize an article. The tool can even analyze YouTube videos in real time. You can almost think of this as a more targeted version of what the new AI Mode search experience does for the entire web, and it seems useful.
This is probably what the future of search looks like, and no, it almost certainly won't involve a list of blue links. While you'll undoubtedly be able to access the traditional search experience for quite some time, the sheer volume of Google's latest announcements suggests that AI everything is where we're headed. Headlines around that news echoed the gravity of it all. Reporting from Google's developer conference, Platformer's Casey Newton said, 'everything is changing and normal and scary and chill.' Tech analyst Ben Thompson declared 'the death of the ad-supported web,' thanks to Google. New York magazine's John Herrman put it more bluntly: 'Google is burying the web alive.'
In the chaotic, early days of the web, Google got popular by simplifying the intimidating task of finding things online, as the Washington Post's Geoffrey A. Fowler points out. Its supremacy in this new AI-powered future is far less certain. Maybe another startup will come along and simplify things this time around, so you can have a user-friendly bot explain things to you, book travel for you, and make movies for you.
In the meantime, I'll be trying to perfect my AI-generated crime-fighting Chihuahua cartoon, wondering when any of this will start to feel glorious.
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