It’s been 17 years since I attended the iconic weekly search quality meeting in the Ouagadougou conference room on Google’s Mountain View campus. On this Thursday morning, about thirty engineers, product managers, and executives sat around a table or sprawled on the floor to discuss why certain queries or categories weren’t producing perfect results and to suggest fixes. In 2010, during these meetings, Google introduced 550 changes to the search algorithm, which seemed an impressive number at the time.
This memory looks like a tin man. This week at Google’s I/O developer conference, the keynote speaker — search chief Liz Reid — officially downgraded good, old-fashioned search engines to virtual oblivion. This was a continuation of a process that began two years ago, when Google introduced its “AI Overview,” the summaries that sit at the top of the search results page and literally lurk above the famed “10 Blue Links.” By then, these links had already been degraded, so too often the most relevant ones they were buried under aggregators, spam and shopping results and Google maps. Now, in what Reid described as the most significant change to the search field in the company’s history, users have direct communication with the latest version of Google Gemini. Even the term “query” seems antiquated, as human input is the beginning of a conversation in which AI can collaborate. This process may also take into account the personal data that Google knows about you, and there is a lot of it. The answer to the question may be a custom-made presentation, perhaps enhanced by artificial intelligence agents who scour digital nooks and crannies to root out information. The transformation is complete. On stage, Google said it out noisy: “Google Search is an AI search engine.”
The search box used to be an online portal. The up-to-date “smart” box invites you to order a customized response to user queries based on Gemini technology, and sometimes even create a mini-publication on the fly with charts, bullet points and even animations. Google prided itself on interpreting cryptic search terms to guess a user’s intent. Now it encourages seekers to engage with Gemini in the form of a conversational prompt. To highlight this change, Google representatives at the conference wore T-shirts that said “Ask me anything,” echoing Gemini’s prompts. Like the desktop version, if you asked these smiling helpers for directions, the answer didn’t result in you clicking and going to the website.
Our digital lives are currently at an uncomfortable transition point. AI seems to be powering every business model, with giants like Google weaving AI into all of their products and operations. At the same time, resistance and even revulsion increases as this powerful and terrifying technology creeps into our lives. Just notice hum when commencement speakers mention artificial intelligence. But according to Google, AI search – if you still want to call it that – is inevitable, which even AI haters will appreciate.
I was among those who flinched when the AI overhaul was introduced in 2024. Now I admit that the overhaul – and the deeper “AI mode” it encourages people to exploit – is simply better in many cases, e.g. Saturday Night Live has a up-to-date episode, gets an explanation of the agent’s harness, and even finds a link. When I searched for the WIRED article that described the Ouagadougou meeting, the blue links were less than helpful. But when I explained in uncomplicated terms what I was looking for, I found it immediately.
So it works. Google says more than a billion people a month search in AI mode, a separate tab on Google’s website where links are even more peripheral. The number of AI queries doubles every quarter.