Google’s recent I/O event made it clear: the company’s vision for the future is deeply intertwined with artificial intelligence, particularly in how we interact with its ubiquitous search engine. The era of simply typing keywords and sifting through endless blue links is evolving, giving way to a more intelligent, agentic, and personalized search experience.
Google envisions using AI to do a significant amount of “Googling” for you. This new paradigm is exemplified by features designed to understand complex queries, synthesize information, perform tasks, and even interact with your real-world surroundings.
AI Mode: Your New Chatbot in Search
At the heart of this transformation is AI Mode in Google Search. Rolled out to all users in the US, this feature appears as a new tab directly in Search or accessible from the search bar, replacing the traditional “I’m Feeling Lucky” widget in some instances. AI Mode presents a more chatbot-like interface right within the search results.
Instead of just providing a list of links, AI Mode works behind the scenes to pull in vast amounts of information and synthesize it into a coherent response. You can ask whatever is on your mind, and Search gets to work, generating a response that puts everything together for you, including links to content, creators, merchants, and businesses. The entire user interface dynamically adapts to your question, combining text, images, links, and even maps.
Soon, AI Mode will offer personalized suggestions based on your past searches and recent activities, such as restaurant bookings or subscriptions to newsletters. This allows Search to understand your preferences, like favoring outdoor seating or suggesting relevant art exhibits. For shoppers, AI Mode can dynamically generate browsable mosaics of images and shoppable products personalized just for you. It can even recommend products based on specific needs, like durable, low-pile, and washable rugs for homes with active kids. A new virtual try-on feature for clothing is also being introduced within the shopping experience.
Powering the Change: Query Fanout and Deep Search
Much of AI Mode’s power comes from what Liz Reid, who leads Google’s Search team, calls the “query fanout technique“. Search recognizes when a question requires advanced reasoning. It then utilizes a custom version of the Gemini AI model to break the question down into different subtopics and simultaneously issue a multitude of queries on your behalf. This technique searches across the entire web, going deeper than a traditional search. It also accesses real-time data from Google’s datasets, including the Knowledge Graph, Shopping Graph, and local data from sources like Maps community contributors. Search then compiles a response and checks its work to ensure information quality, issuing more searches if gaps are detected. This allows you to get a comprehensive answer from a single, fast search.
The AI Mode interface can even show you the number of searches it is running for you. Building on this technique, Google plans to add a “Deep Search” feature to AI Mode this summer. This feature multiplies the query fanout technique, potentially issuing dozens or even hundreds of searches on your behalf to create expert-level, fully cited reports in minutes. Deep Search can reason across disparate pieces of information and is expected to include features for complex analysis and data visualization, particularly for sports and financial questions, allowing users to analyze statistics like batting averages or home run counts.
Project Mariner: AI That Completes Tasks
Google’s ambition goes beyond just answering questions; they want AI to perform tasks for you. Project Mariner, a tool you can specifically instruct to do tasks on the web, is central to this vision. It can manage up to 10 simultaneous tasks and includes a “Teach and Repeat” feature, allowing you to train it to perform specific actions in the future.
Project Mariner enables AI Mode to handle tasks that typically require multiple steps. For example, you could ask Search to “Find two affordable tickets for this Saturday’s Reds game in the lower level”. Project Mariner kicks off a query fanout across several sites, analyzes hundreds of ticket options, and presents great options with helpful context. Project Mariner is coming to AI Mode this summer and will initially be available for tasks like buying tickets through services such as Ticketmaster and StubHub, making restaurant reservations via platforms like Resy, and booking local appointments through services like Vagaro.
Project Mariner also powers the new Agent Mode feature in the Gemini app, allowing it to perform tasks on your behalf, such as checking Zillow listings to help find an apartment.
Beyond task automation, AI Mode is also integrating multimodality. The “Search Live” feature allows you to use your camera to show Google what you see and get helpful information in real-time. This can be used to identify objects, understand processes, or troubleshoot issues just by pointing your phone and asking a question.
A Shift in Vision: From Links to AI Agents
This extensive integration of AI signifies a fundamental shift in Google’s approach to search. Instead of being a box for processing keywords, Google is moving towards a system of “digital agents”. The company believes AI will become “the most powerful engine for discovery that the web has ever seen”. However, this discovery will increasingly involve Google’s AI doing the work of finding, synthesizing, and even acting on information for you.
This strategic pivot comes as Google faces increased competition from AI-powered search engines and chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Perplexity. While Google’s Gemini product is highly capable, its user base currently lags behind ChatGPT’s estimated 160 million daily active users. By integrating advanced AI capabilities directly into its core search product and homepage, Google is aggressively seeking to maintain its relevance and demonstrate that its nearly 30-year-old service is evolving in the AI era.
Conclusion: Google’s AI-Powered Future
Google’s announcements paint a clear picture: the future of searching the web involves a more dynamic, intelligent, and automated experience powered by AI. AI Mode, with its conversational interface, the power of Query Fanout and Deep Search, and the task automation capabilities of Project Mariner, transforms search from a passive information retrieval tool into a proactive digital assistant. As these AI features become more integrated and sophisticated, “Googling” will likely mean instructing an AI to explore, synthesize, and even act on the information you need.
Source:
The information in this article is drawn from the provided excerpts. A key source informing the core topic of Google’s AI future and the “Google Googling” concept is:
https://neurosignal.tech/