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In recent years Google has used the word “useful” to describe new features added to its search product, its voice assistant and its generative artificial intelligence tool. Bardeven your pixel headphones. A search for the word “helpful” on Google’s corporate news blog returns more than 1,200 results.
However, depending on what you’re looking for, Google’s main search service has become less useful. As one columnist describes it, Google search is now a “tragedy” that is “inflated and overmonetized.” He Financial times points out that it is “full of ads”—Less encyclopedia, more yellow pages. Prominent former Google employee blames poor Google search quality the degradation of the website itself—Not explicitly Google, which still offers the world’s information for free and at our fingertips. AND A recent study on the results of product reviews shows that, despite signs of lower quality search results, Google actually performs better than some of its competitors.
But it doesn’t take a group of researchers or the credentials of a top technologist to do a quick Google search and realize that the first results, at least, are ads, with more clutter appearing below the digital page.
Google, like other tech giants, now sees generative AI as a tool to streamline and speed up search and now finds itself straddling a fine line between making search actually smarter and making its already overloaded interface even more dirty. of user. Its latest announcements about generative AI in mobile search are part of that experiment: Is it possible to make Google search more convenient and accessible, even if the company remains committed to the same advertising strategy?
Later this month, high-end Android phones (Google’s Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro along with Samsung’s new Galaxy S24 phones) will get some new AI features that integrate search (and Google Lens, the app company’s image recognition system). directly to other applications on your phone. One such feature is called Circle to Search, which lets you use touch to select images, text, or videos within an app and run a quick search in an overlay that appears at the bottom of the screen.
One example Google gave in an early demo was a text message exchange between friends, where one friend suggested a restaurant and the other could circle to search for it and get results for the restaurant without leaving the text app. Another use case would be to pause and circle a product you find in an Instagram video and run a search for that product, again all within the same app screen.
Courtesy of Google
Both of these use cases are examples of some search efficiency (a type of utility, if you will) because they allow the user to perform searches without switching between applications. But they also present obvious business opportunities (which is often what Lens is used for, in addition to nature observation), which means they are good for Google’s advertising business. Google confirmed that search and shopping ads will continue to appear in dedicated ad spaces on the results page. Since the search overlay will only take up a fraction of your mobile screen, if the results are ads, it could quickly end up being more frustrating than efficient.
That’s where generative AI comes in: a summarized answer might make more sense in limited screen space, rather than a series of links. Google’s new AI-powered multi-search feature does something similar to Circle to Search, just with a different input. When you use Google Lens now, the visual search option within Google’s mobile app, by pointing your phone at an object, the results will include “AI-powered information” in addition to the search results you’d already expect.
