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Hans India
22-05-2025
- Business
- Hans India
News Publishers Call Google's AI Mode ‘Theft', Demand Regulatory Intervention
Google's latest AI-powered feature in Search—AI Mode—is sparking an intense backlash from news publishers, who say the tool is exploiting their content without consent or compensation. The News/Media Alliance, a major U.S.-based media group representing around 2,000 publishers, has called the new feature a form of 'theft' and is urging federal regulators to step in. Announced at Google's I/O 2025 developer event, AI Mode is designed to make Search more conversational, allowing users to interact with it like a chatbot. Rather than presenting users with a list of clickable links as traditional search engines do, the new feature provides instant, full-length responses to user queries—answers that are often drawn from the very content produced by journalists and media houses. Danielle Coffey, President and CEO of the News/Media Alliance, condemned the move: 'Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue. Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, the definition of theft.' The group is calling on the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) to step in, warning that Google's growing dominance over online information could severely harm journalism and public discourse. 'The DOJ remedies must address this to prevent continued domination of the internet by one company,' Coffey added. AI Mode has been in testing via Google Labs for several months but is now rolling out to a wider audience in the United States. According to Google, the tool is accessible without requiring user sign-in and is primarily designed for mobile platforms. There's no official word yet on when it will launch in other countries, including India. Google is pitching AI Mode as the natural evolution of Search, claiming it enhances user experience by simplifying complex queries, saving time, and helping users with tasks like booking services, analysing data, or comparing prices. Rather than just showing snippets or headlines, AI Mode scans multiple websites—often news articles—and delivers detailed answers in seconds. Alongside AI Mode, Google is introducing other features like Deep Search and Search Live. Deep Search can generate detailed responses by running hundreds of background queries, while Search Live uses your phone camera to answer questions about real-world objects in real time, effectively integrating Gemini Live into Search. Despite the technological innovation, publishers fear these tools will undermine their presence in the digital ecosystem. As AI responses become the primary source of information in Google Search, users may no longer feel the need to click through to the original articles, leading to significant losses in traffic, ad revenue, and influence for news organisations. This controversy comes at a sensitive time for Google, as it is currently embroiled in an antitrust trial in the U.S. A federal court has already determined that Google is a 'monopolist' in the search market, and the case has now entered the remedies phase—where regulators and the court are exploring how best to curb the tech giant's power. Among the remedies proposed by the DoJ are forcing Google to divest its Chrome browser and requiring it to share search data with competitors. Now, publishers want the AI Mode issue to be included in this broader regulatory crackdown, arguing that without intervention, journalism's role in a democratic society could be irreparably harmed. As AI tools continue to reshape the internet, the battle over how content is used—and who gets credit or compensation—has become more urgent than ever. For publishers, this isn't just about traffic but survival in the AI age. Tags: Google AI Mode controversy, News publishers, Google, AI Search and media, Google antitrust case, AI Mode, Tech News, Technology
India Today
22-05-2025
- Business
- India Today
News publishers say AI Mode in Google Search is theft of their work
Google's push for the AI-fication of Search has the company facing strong criticism from news publishers. A major media group in the United States has accused Google of misusing their content without offering anything in return. They have called it 'theft'. At the heart of the controversy is Google's new feature called AI Mode, which the company officially announced at its annual I/O 2025 developer event. With this tool, users can interact with Google Search as if it were a chatbot, asking complex queries and follow-up questions, and getting full responses in return, without actually needing to click on any traditional News/Media Alliance, which represents around 2,000 publishers in the US, issued a sharp response to the launch. Danielle Coffey, the group's president and CEO, said, 'Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue. Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, the definition of theft.'advertisementThe group is urging US regulators, particularly the Department of Justice (DoJ), to intervene. The group believes that Google's dominance over online information is increasingly unchecked, and that the new AI Mode further weakens the already strained relationship between publishers and the tech platform. 'The DOJ remedies must address this to prevent continued domination of the internet by one company,' Coffey added in his meanwhile, is presenting AI Mode as the natural next step in the evolution of Search. The feature has been tested with select users through Google Labs for months now, but starting Wednesday, it is widely available across the US. Users don't even need to sign in to use it, and it is primarily being rolled out on mobile devices. The availability of the feature in India is unclear right According to Google, AI Mode is designed to make search more conversational and helpful. Instead of showing users a page full of links – how we see it right now, minus the AI Overview on top – the AI breaks down the query, scans multiple websites, and gives users detailed answers in seconds. It can even help users with tasks like booking a ticket, comparing prices, reserving a table at a restaurant, or analysing financial addition to that, AI Mode also comes with features like Deep Search and Search Live that add more AI power to the feature. Deep Search lets users run hundreds of background queries to create a detailed response, while Search Live lets users point their phone's camera at something and ask questions about it in real time. Think of it as Gemini Live integration into Google these tools have the potential to offer great convenience to users, news and media publishers argue that with such deep-rooted AI-tools embedded into Google Search – which will generate most of its responses based on the information provided by media houses – publishers are being further pushed out of the online ecosystem. Because if Google shows users AI responses – which will be built on the media publishers' work – users will feel less and less need to visit the original source of information, which will eventually cost publishers valuable traffic and media publishers have urged the DoJ to look into the issue as Google's antitrust trial – where the US court found the company to be a 'monopolist' – is currently in the remedies phase. Basically, the court in the US has found that Google is monopolising the search market, and now they are trying to find the right solution to fix that. The DoJ has proposed that the company should be forced to divest Google Chrome, and it should be asked to share its search data with its In
Business Insider
21-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Google launched a dizzying array of new AI products, and it's getting harder to make sense of them all
Attending Google's I/O developer conference is like being doused with a firehose of new AI announcements. At I/O's keynote event on Tuesday, Business Insider counted at least two dozen new models, features, and updates. "We are shipping faster than ever," Google CEO Sundar Pichai boasted onstage. Indeed. But it's starting to get a little confusing. For one, some of the launches seem to overlap with each other. Launching so many AI products in such a short timeframe is impressive, and it can also feel scatterbrained. AI Mode allows you to chat with Google as you browse the web, creating a more conversational search experience. Don't confuse it with Gemini in Chrome, which allows you to ask Gemini questions while you browse. With Gemini Live, you can point your phone at whatever you want and talk to the AI assistant about it. Don't mistake it for Search Live, which allows you to chat with Search about whatever your phone sees. Project Mariner is an experimental AI agent that can take actions like booking tickets. Gemini's upcoming Agent Mode also has agentic capabilities, like helping users find just the right Zillow listing. Not all the new tools seemed that similar. Google launched an impressive new AI filmmaking tool called Flow, powered by its new model Veo 3. Google also touted updates to an entirely separate AI model family from Gemini called Gemma which, incidentally, can help decipher how dolphins talk to each other — that's DolphinGemma. Multiple Googlers that Business Insider spoke with at I/O used a single word to describe Google's current rate of shipping: "intense." Google's approach complicates its own vision of building a single, universal AI assistant. (That mission has its own name, too: Project Astra.) OpenAI is also moving fast towards this goal and appears intent on launching a dedicated device to run it, given its recent purchase of Apple designer Jony Ive's hardware startup. Google risks building so many overlapping AI products that it will be tough to compete with a single, more stand-alone solution, such as an AI-native phone. No one's counting Google out, though. The tech giant has become an undeniable AI leader, inventing much of the core research behind the current boom and successfully launching transformational technology like Waymo. Time will tell whether Google's more sprawling approach wins out.
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
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 ( and Perplexity ( 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@ Follow him on X/Twitter at @DanielHowley.
