Google gives its search engine a makeover

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California: Google on Wednesday disclosed plans to infuse its dominant search engine with more advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technology in response to one of the biggest threats to its long-established position as the internet’s main gateway.

The gradual shift in how Google’s search engine runs is rolling out three months after Microsoft’s Bing search engine started to tap into technology similar to that which powers the artificially intelligent chatbot ChatGPT, which has created one of Silicon Valley’s biggest buzzes since Apple released the first iPhone 16 years ago.

Google already has been testing its own conversational chatbot called Bard. That product, powered by technology called generative AI that also fuels ChatGPT, has only been available to people accepted from a waitlist. But Google announced Wednesday that Bard will be available to all comers in more than 180 countries and more languages beyond English.

Bard’s multilingual expansion will begin with Japanese and Korean before adding about 40 more languages.

Google is now ready to test the AI waters with its search engine, which has been synonymous with finding things on the internet for the past 20 years and serves as the pillar of a digital advertising empire that generated more than $220 billion in revenue last year.

“We are at an exciting inflection point,” Alphabet Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai told a packed developers conference in a speech peppered with one AI reference after another. “We are reimagining all our products, including search.”

More AI technology will be coming to Google’s Gmail with a “Help Me Write” option that will produce lengthy replies to emails in seconds, and a tool for photos called “Magic Editor” that will automatically doctor pictures.

The AI transition will begin cautiously with the search engine that serves as Google’s crown jewel.

The deliberate approach reflects the balancing act that Google must negotiate as it tries to remain on the cutting edge while also preserving its reputation for delivering reliable search results.

The tendency to produce deceptively convincing answers to questions has already been cropping up during the early testing of Bard, which like ChatGPT, relies on still-evolving generative AI technology.

Google will take its next AI steps through a newly formed search lab where people in the United States can join a waitlist to test how generative AI will be incorporated in search results. The tests also include the more traditional links to external websites where users can read more extensive information about queried topics. It may take several weeks before Google starts sending invitations to those accepted from the waitlist to test the AI-injected search engine.

The AI results will be clearly tagged as an experimental form of technology, and Google is pledging the AI-generated summaries will sound more factual than conversational. Google is building in guardrails that will prevent the AI baked into the search engine from responding to sensitive questions such as, “Should I give Tylenol to a 3-year-old?” In those instances, Google will continue to steer people to authoritative websites.

Google is not predicting how long it will be before its search engine will include generative AI results for all comers. The company has been under intensifying pressure to demonstrate how its search engine will maintain its leadership since Microsoft began to load AI into Bing, which remains a distant second to Google.

As it begins to ingrain AI in its search engine, Google is aiming to make Bard smarter by connecting with the next generation of a massive data set known as a “large language model” (LLM) that fuels it. The LLM that Bard relies on is dubbed Pathways Language Model (PaLM). The AI in Google’s search engine will draw upon the next-generation PaLM2 and another technology known as a Multitask Unified Model.

Although people will have to wait to see how Google’s search engine will deploy generative AI to find answers, a new tool will soon be more broadly available to all users. Google is going to add a new filter called “Perspectives” that will focus on what people are saying online about whatever topic is entered into the search engine. The new feature will be placed along existing search filters for news, images and video.