Google has signalled the death of googling. What comes next?

Times

2 days ago

For a quarter of a century, the front page of the internet hasn't changed: a spare, white screen with a rectangular search box beneath a single word: Google.
Whether for practical purposes — getting the best price for a flight to Sardinia, finding a new frying pan — or to settle an argument, such as who is the best tennis player of all time — Google is the first port of call.
The company that began as a student project by two Stanford computer science students became a pillar of modern life, a utility, like running water.
It also turned into perhaps the best business the world has ever seen. Google handles nine of every ten searches on the web and, according to Forbes, its co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are worth $144 billion and $138 billion respectively. Last year Alphabet, Google's parent company, brought in $350 billion in sales — more than the gross domestic product of 140 countries, thanks mostly to cash from advertisers who pay to jam their products high up into the results of the 8.5 billion searches that Google runs every day.
It is the most elegant of machines.
And yet, last month Google rolled out something that gave a glimpse of a very different Google, a new way to search and, long term, potentially an entirely new internet — AI Mode.
This is a quantum leap that threatens to radically upend the landscape of the internet. 'Google is disrupting itself,' said Laurence O'Toole, chief executive of Authoritas, a specialist AI search consultancy. The change, he added, was 'seismic'.
It arrived for British users on Wednesday, a form of search that allows people to ask any question to what looks like a chatbot and receive a detailed answer — not just a list of blue hyperlinks. And the more complex or detailed the query, the better. Google said that the new version handles queries that 'would have previously required multiple searches'.
In short, it invites you almost to talk to Google. No need to trim or fine-tune your question: just blather on and let Google figure it out. On a desktop, users can press the AI Mode button in the search bar, on a mobile, one can enable AI Mode from the list at the top of the tabs, then tap the microphone button and start talking to get across your query, 'as messy or complicated as it may be', said Google.
An example. Why, I ask, has Nigel Farage become so popular? Once I hit 'enter', AI Mode goes into 'thinking' mode. It whirrs into action, scanning through webpages in their hundreds in a fraction of a second, according to its 'sites' counter. Then, it spits out a summary. Farage, the answer read, had, 'tapped into a sense of frustration and disillusionment with the mainstream political establishment in the UK', before offering six bullet points to flesh out its point, from his 'strong stance on immigration' to his 'social media savvy' and shifting demographics.
The answers often included small icons, indicating links to third-party sites that were prime sources of AI Mode's musings. But what it did not do was give that familiar list of links to click on.
For two decades now we have been a slave to the search engine algorithm — but potentially no more. This is important because those links are not only the fuel of the Google machine, they are the architecture of the web we have come to know and been conditioned to expect.
Companies pay top dollar to show up there, and critically, above their rivals. In America, land of the class-action lawsuit, lawyers want to make sure they are first in line when someone goes googling. One of the most expensive keyword search terms is 'mesothelioma attorney', coming in at $236 per click, according to PPC, an online ad specialist. Lawsuits over mesothelioma, a form of cancer attributed to asbestos exposure, have generated tens of billions of dollars in payouts.
The cheapest search terms — those deemed least likely to lead to a purchase, such as 'can dogs smell fear?' — go for as little as five cents. The beauty of the great Google ad machine, however, is that no matter what you look for, clicks turn into cash, and that cash flows into Google's coffers.
Which leads to the basic question: why on earth would Google ever want to toy with killing its golden goose? The answer is simply ChatGPT.
It was early 2023 when Sundar Pichai, Google's long-serving chief executive, issued a 'code red'. OpenAI had just released ChatGPT, a new chatbot that was wildly powerful, capable of passing standardised tests, telling jokes and answering virtually any question thrown its way.
To the internet-using public, it felt like magic. To Google, it felt like a threat. 'Google has been the greatest business in the history of capitalism for 20 years because they owned the consumer. They owned the verb,' said Brad Gerstner, a renowned tech investor, last week. 'The first real threat in 20 years came about in the ChatGPT moment, and it's continued to accelerate.'
Put another way, the arrival of ChatGPT, and its many rivals, offer an entirely new way to interact with technology. Ask a question, get an answer, as opposed to a mix of ads and website links that one must then navigate to track down the right product or answer.
Critics have long railed against Google, seeing it as little more than a reconstituted, global Yellow Pages with search results shoved beneath a long list of ads.
AI bots such as ChatGPT offer a wholly different experience, which for many is simply better. From a standing start less than three years ago, ChatGPT is now used by more than 700 million people every week, and handles a billion searches for them. People — especially younger ones — are striking up relationships with chatbots, sharing their deepest, darkest secrets and seeking advice. It is almost intimate. So, of course, they are also going to their trusted bots for product recommendations and research queries — and it threatens to erode Google's business.
Google's AI Mode is the result of necessity and signposts the way the internet is heading. There are still limitations. It can't yet make a dinner reservation or book you a flight. But it can tell you what airlines fly direct to Barcelona, and remember an admonition to never show results with a certain airline — ahem — with which I have had several bad experiences. It will also suggest a weekend itinerary. In response to a request for a weekend in Barcelona 'off the beaten track', it suggested good walking neighbourhoods, such as Gràcia, and olive-oil tasting in Sant Antoni, with links to sites that offer more information or direct booking.
That last step in the process — doing things for you — is not far off. Google, OpenAI and the rest of the industry are working feverishly on 'agents', bots that, for example, have your credit card details and will autonomously carry out tasks, from booking travel to taking charge of everyday drudgery, such as ordering toilet paper and toothpaste.
In this not-to-distant future, where everyone has a digital butler and their human masters are abstracted away from many purchasing decisions, advertising will probably look very different. The marketing plans and brand strategies businesses tailored to the Google search algorithm? Trashed.
There are early signs of the changes afoot. Last year Google rolled out AI Overviews. These are less detailed summaries than those offered by AI Mode, and sit atop the familiar cascade of search results. They are disrupting the industry, with some websites reporting as much as a 50 per cent drop in traffic when Google results include AI overviews.
Google disputes this: 'We continue to send billions of clicks to websites every day, and we have not seen dramatic drops in aggregate web traffic as is being suggested.'
But Google's changes are, in a way, preparation for a much more profound technological shift: the death of the smartphone. When highly capable bots can understand and respond to spoken queries, is spending hours peering into a little black mirror in one's palm really the pinnacle of technology? Or will we, in the not too distant future, look back on how we use technology today as an almost cro-magnon existence, pecking at a little glass rectangle, grunting, smiling and crying at what it yields?
This is the bet of Sir Jony Ive, the celebrated British industrial designer behind the iPhone and iPod. He recently joined forces with OpenAI to design a novel, AI-centred device.
Ive has kept schtum as to what it will look like, but there is speculation that it will be a screenless, potentially wearable device (a necklace or lapel pin, perhaps) with a camera and a microphone that can see what we see, hear what we hear, and respond in natural language to anything a wearer might ask.
'Jony recently gave me one of the prototypes of the device for the first time to take home, and I've been able to live with it,' said OpenAI's co-founder Sam Altman. 'And I think it is the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen.'
In that context, where screens take a back seat, where ambient AI's become the norm, Google's AI Mode starts to make more sense.
A static list of blue links? That is so 2024. AI Mode is just the beginning.