In the realm of information navigation, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet/Google, envisions a dynamic shift towards AI-driven responses coupled with seamless website guidance.
At the 2024 Business, Government, and Society Forum at Stanford University, Pichai emphasised Google’s commitment to evolving search into a generative experience where AI-generated answers merge seamlessly with intuitive website exploration.
Gone are the days of mere “10 blue links,” as Pichai asserted Google’s transformation under the influence of AI, heralding a future where information retrieval and navigation converge in unprecedented ways.
“When mobile came, we knew Google Search had to evolve a lot. We call it featured snippets, but for almost 10 years now you go to Google for many questions we kind of use AI to answer them. We call it web answers internally. … We’ve always answered questions where we can. But we always felt when people come and look for information. People, in certain cases, want answers but they also want the richness and the diversity of what’s out there in the world and it’s a good balance to be had and we’ve always I think struck that balance pretty well.”
“To me all that is different is now the technology by which you can answer is progressing. We will continue doing that. But this evolution has been underway in search for a long, long time.”
“We’ve done all this in Google Search for a long time and people like it, people engage with it, people trust it. I view it as a natural continuation. With LLMs and AI, I think you have a more powerful tool to do that, which is what we are putting in Search with Search Generative Experience and so we’ll continue evolving it in that direction, too.”
Answers vs. search
Google’s longstanding mission to organise and democratise global information has been a cornerstone of its philosophy. Throughout its history, Google has strived to faithfully represent the breadth of content on the web while ensuring the delivery of reliable and valuable information to users.
Sundar Pichai highlighted the significance of Google’s search rater guidelines as a means of capturing the perspectives of its diverse user base. Moreover, in the recent antitrust trial, Pandu Nayak’s insights underscored the pivotal role of information satisfaction (IS) scores, derived from raters, in evaluating search quality.
Yet, the advent of Google SGE and AI-generated responses has stirred apprehensions among brands, SEO experts, and content creators. There’s a legitimate concern that users might bypass traditional website clicks in favour of direct answers from SGE. In response to these anxieties, Google has endeavoured to strike a delicate equilibrium, as articulated by Pichai:
“There are certain times you give an answer – “what’s the population of the United States” – yes it’s an answerable question. There are times you want to surface the breadth of opinions out there on the web, which is what search does and does it well. Just because you’re saying we are summarizing it on top doesn’t mean we veer from those principles. The summary can still point you to the range of opinions out there”
AI improving Search
Pichai has often likened the transformative power of AI to that of fire or electricity, emphasising its profound impact on human civilization. One aspect that particularly excites Pichai is AI’s potential to enhance search capabilities.
“I feel the weight that people come to search at very vulnerable moments. … Trust is hard-earned, easy to lose. We have to re-earn it all the time”
“It’s difficult to do this consistently well across the entirety of what humanity is looking for, which is what excites me about search and providing information and knowledge and is what I see as the opportunity. AI is an exciting technology which will allow us to do it better than before. But it’s a technology we have to carefully deploy in a way that we are responsible while doing so.”
Why we care
Over the past year, the profound influence of AI has significantly transformed the landscape of Google Search and SEO, with further substantial changes anticipated in the near future. It’s crucial to keep abreast of the evolving trajectory of Google Search, looking ahead rather than dwelling solely on its current or past state.
However, it’s impossible to overlook the somewhat hollow resonance of Pichai’s interview, particularly amidst the valid criticisms surrounding the quality of search results and the responses generated by SGE.
The interview he gave can be seen below:
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