ChatGPT represents a response to major changes in the way people access information on the Internet, including the emergence of AI bots. They will move the service further away from its traditional format, known informally as “10 Blue Links,” according to company documents and people familiar with the matter.
According to the documents, Google plans to make its search engine more “visual, snackable, personal and human”, with a focus on serving youth globally. The docs say the same way it’s historically been done with websites.
At its annual I/O developer conference this coming week, the search giant is expected to debut new features that allow users to interact with an artificial-intelligence program, a project code-named “Magi.” others familiar with said. Case.
For years, Alphabet’s Google has made minimal changes to the look and feel of search, powering an advertising business that generated more than $162 billion in revenue last year. But that is changing with the rapid rise of AI chatbots and short-video apps like TikTok, both of which have captured the attention of younger users.
Broadly speaking, Google plans to put more emphasis on answering questions that can’t easily be answered by traditional web results, according to internal reference documents outlining the company’s strategy for making changes to the search engine this year. cannot be given.
Google search visitors may be prompted to ask follow-up questions more often in response to their queries or swipe through scenes such as TikTok videos.
The company has already moved to integrate some online forum posts and short videos into search results, but plans to place an even greater emphasis on such content in the future, according to internal documents and people familiar with the matter.
People familiar with the discussions said Google executives have stressed to employees that the number of active websites has stagnated in recent years. Internet users are increasingly turning to other apps for everything from popular local restaurants to advice on how to be more productive.
“More than answers, we’ll help you when there’s no right answer,” Google executives said in the documents.
A Google spokesperson said that search has “always been an incredibly dynamic, fast-evolving area,” and that the company is focused on a long-term approach to transforming the service that includes integrating AI and visual features. Is.
“As search evolves, providing high-quality information and supporting a healthy, open web will remain central to our approach,” the spokesperson said.
Google has an opportunity to lead a change in consumer behavior around Internet search, but if the company doesn’t move fast enough, people will turn to other services, said John Battle, author of “The Search”, 2005 Published in History of Google.
“This is a really important moment for the company, and I think they are well aware of that,” Mr. Battle said.
Google’s search engine, the world’s most heavily trafficked website, has handled more than 90% of searches on computers and mobile devices for years, according to data provider StatCounter. In 2020, the Justice Department sued Google for its alleged dominance of the search market, the most significant US antitrust lawsuit since the government challenged Microsoft’s position in the personal computer software market in the 1990s. (The trial is expected to go to trial later this year.)
Since then, many new AI-powered apps have exploded in popularity, posing new challenges to Google’s power as a portal to the Internet. Recently, the ChatGPT bot developed by Microsoft-backed OpenAI has raised alarms inside Google, pushing the lead to accelerate work on similar products.
Microsoft earlier this year built the technology behind ChatGPT into its search engine Bing, creating a version that can hold extended conversations with users. Smaller search engines have also raced to incorporate conversational AI features, hoping to win users over faster than Google.
Millions of people use Google for important tasks, and websites such as online news outlets depend on the search engine for a large portion of their traffic. Those factors, along with the large amount of revenue tied to the product, have made it difficult to implement major changes in search.
“For them, it’s not about whether they have the talent and the team to do this. It’s more about how concerned they are about their image and shareholders,” said Arvind Srinivas, a former Google and OpenAI researcher. Said, who is the chief executive of search startup Perplexity.
Mr. Srinivas said Perplexity’s conversational search engine, founded last year, has 2.8 million monthly active users.
Chatbots like ChatGPT have a tendency to source and even source information with confidence. A recent study by Stanford University researchers of search engines using conversational AI technology found that only 51.5% of sentences included proper citations, and that more than a quarter of the citations supported the content of their respective sentences. did not do.
Earlier this year, a version of Microsoft’s Bing that used the technology behind ChatGPT caused errors and annoying reactions for some users, prompting the company to call the product a work in progress and make several changes to its technology. inspired to do. According to StatCounter, Bing’s share of the search market has remained below 3% since Microsoft introduced the feature in February.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Google executives have emphasized that search products using interactive AI features should not bother website owners by including source links. Bard, in response to ChatGPT, included some links to external sources when it was released in March, but Google stopped short of integrating it directly into search.
The company recently invited a large group of employees to test Maggi ahead of its introduction at the annual I/O conference on May 10, people familiar with the matter said. The New York Times previously reported the name of the project.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in an interview with the Journal last month that one of the possible new search features would allow users to ask follow-up questions on their original queries.
“We’re working to make sure it works well for users—they have a high bar, and we want to meet that bar,” Mr. Pichai said.
Google executives have also closely watched the rapid growth of China-based ByteDance-owned TikTok. Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president overseeing the search engine, told a conference in July last year that nearly 40% of youth turn to TikTok or Meta Platforms-owned Instagram when searching for restaurants, citing an internal study. Are.
The inclusion of more user-generated content in search results also brings up a number of tricky issues. The researchers said platforms such as TikTok can be powerful vectors for false and misleading information because people have a tendency to trust other human speakers.
According to documents outlining the company’s search strategy, the shift will present Google with “the need to refine our definition of ‘trusted’ content, especially when there is no right answer”. Google will provide “attribution and literacy tools to enable trust in the use of content,” according to the documents.