Get ready for ‘AI mode’
Google’s newest tools will upend search as we know it. Restaurants, take note.
On Tuesday, Google hosted its annual I/O keynote, an event targeted at web developers, inside a 20,000-person outdoor amphitheater near its Mountain View, California HQ. In a two-hour presentation, the company’s top execs spelled out the future of Google search with just two letters: A and I.
Obviously, capitalizing on artificial intelligence is the future for the world’s largest tech companies. (It’s the future for small tech companies, too.) But those who watch these announcements closely, fellow journalists, technologists, investors, etc., are collectively — this is a highly technical term — freaking out over the intensity at which Google announced its new developments and changes.
Take longtime tech journalist turned investor turned newsletter founder M.G. Siegler, who led his event recap with a clear, “Google is not f*cking around.”
This newsletter is big on vibes, and the ones coming from the epicenter of the technology universe are too strong to ignore. Google says AI will fundamentally change the way we find information on the internet — including restaurant ratings, recommendations, and basic attributes like hours and street addresses.
Or, as Liz Reid, Google’s head of search, shared during the event: Google thinks AI will be “the most powerful engine for discovery that the web has ever seen.”
Now it’s telling us how.
AI mode, activate
Decades ago, Google set out to organize the world’s information. Its evolving algorithms that surfaced relevant content were the source of much speculation and, eventually, an entire industry of search-engine optimization that helped people, businesses, and publishers surface their content in search results. When Google makes a change, anyone with a vested interest in content on the web — say, journalists and other creators — notices.
Google searches are a meaningful driver of both traffic and business for restaurants. And all the information Google’s collected about these local businesses will soon make its way into “AI mode,” an experimental search feature that Google says builds on top of the “AI overviews” that have been showing up on top of search results for months.
During Tuesday’s event, Reid demoed one potential use case: planning a weekend in Nashville for a group of friends, including, of course, restaurant recommendations. In response, AI mode spit out suggestions for activities, including a custom map of places to go, pulling restaurant and other business data from Google Maps, itself containing a ridiculous amount of user-submitted content, including ratings, photos, and reviews. (Users submit up to 200 million pieces of content per day.)
This new AI-assisted search, which is actually tens or even hundreds of searches combined to quickly generate a succinct result goes “way deeper than a traditional search,” Reid said.
(Cleverly, the Verge called this, “Google googling.”)
So when does it all change?
If all of this AI talk has your head spinning, you’re not alone. Tech companies love to talk about the promise and potential of their experimental technology well before it’s ready for primetime. While it is a foregone conclusion that AI is about to upend how we search the internet, less clear is when this will happen.
Longtime tech journalist (and fellow indie newsletter founder) Casey Newton identified some broad updates from the two-hour keynote on Tuesday, as featured in Tuesday’s edition of Platformer. Among them, an important update on Google’s power:
Google has all the information it needs now, Newton writes, and it has a lot of ideas for making it useful.
Still, as Newton clocks, most new features are still in testing or trial mode.
The disruptions to come will come just a little bit later, he writes. Everything is changing, but not too much, and not too fast.
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The future of online discovery
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What else?
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