Google Search AI: What is changing in Google Search and how will we use it?

Google Search will soon feature AI-generated content. Although Bing already does this, Microsoft has not yet been able to close the gap with its great rival. In the guide, we’ll take a look at the new features that generative AI will change the way we use Google search on all devices later this year.

What is changing in Google Search

It is a fact that new advances in generative AI are redefining what a search engine can do. With this powerful new technology, we can now unlock new types of questions in our online searches.

With new artificial intelligence capabilities, Google minimizes the actions we perform in search, so we can understand a topic faster and, above all, find information more easily.

This is the long-awaited update to Google Search that will now be powered by generative AI, directly threatening Bing. Many experts report that despite the push Microsoft has given it, it hasn’t made up as much lost ground in search engines as it would like, and now that gap may be widening further.

More specifically, Google has already begun to preview the new features of the new search engine in Search Labs through the experimental version of SGE (Search Generative Experience). It is available in Chrome for desktop and in the Google app (Android and iOS).

The SGE update is a new algorithm that Google is developing to improve the ranking of search results. It is designed to take into account a broader range of factors, including content relevance, source quality, and user privacy preferences.

However, only US users can see this update. Also, unlike the company’s Bard chatbot where we can use it with a VPN, we can’t test the new Google search in Greece even if we have an American IP set up.

So, to get a better picture, we’re going to show you these big changes to the way you use search, which are expected to show up soon.

AI-Powered Snapshots: Artificial Intelligence Snapshots

AI-powered snapshots are simply AI-generated snippets of text. I mean, when we do a Google search, the first thing we’ll see are responses with Bard-style snapshots.

So in Google Search, we’ll generally see three main things on the results page. The short excerpts of relevant articles, the standard list of relevant links to explore, and some announcements related to our query.

Google will also back up the text for us with the exact sources it was taken from, which will be prominently displayed with a separate menu.

The important thing here is that AI snapshots will not pull content from a single source. The AI ​​will combine it with results from multiple trusted sources to deliver the best possible result for our query.

This means that the extra actions and clicks that we have to cross or collect the information that the successive search results would give us are reduced to a minimum.

Search optimization with generative AI

For example, suppose we are looking for a new bike for our trip, and at the same time we want information on the most suitable categories according to our body type, as well as a comparison of features, colors, etc.

Normally, we would have to break this question down into smaller sequential questions and investigate each item one after the other, a time consuming task.

With generative AI, the new Google search can do this complex search for us. So instead of going through many stages to locate what we want, AI snapshots will do all the work for us in a fraction of a second.

At the bottom of each of our search results, there will be a series of follow-up questions and suggested next steps that we can choose from if we want to learn even more about a particular topic.

chat mode in search

At the same time, there will also be the related chat field, a chatbot-like feature where we can ask Google more about the topic we are exploring. To activate the Chat Mode, we will need to click on “Continue” that we will see at the bottom of the frame of the drafts with the results.

For example, if our initial search was “good bikes for heavy riders on 20-30km hilly rides”, initially the AI ​​snapshots would have shown us drafts with a wide range of results.

The new Google search will take into account all this context of results, and therefore, we will not need to ask the same question to the AI ​​again. We can pick up where you left off.

So, in the chat field, we just hit ‘Continue’, and then we can use a message like ‘red bikes’ to narrow down the AI-generated results to the correct bikes we’re looking for.

In addition, since we will have all the results in a tab on our screen, we will be able to go further with other indications, such as the desired country of manufacture. The AI ​​will further limit the results with good bikes from this country.

All of this represents an exciting way to filter search results with precision. For the first time in Google Search, we will be able to run very complex queries and confidently expect much better results.

content production

As with ChatGPT, Bing Chat and Claude, with the new Google Search we can ask you to create content for us. We can direct any question to you in the same way that we do with chatbots.

As with Google search, the conversation with Google’s AI will naturally be driven by recently published and updated content, as well as older posts.

Finally, another feature of the new Google search is AI-assisted shopping. It allows us to narrow down the products we are interested in by providing suggested next steps within the chat mode.

The SGE update for the new Google Search is already in an early stage, but it is expected to be officially released in the near future.

As far as Europe is concerned, Google is working on the compliance required by the Court of Justice of the European Communities (ECJ), and once this process is completed, the company intends to gradually make available to everyone, the new Google search engine.

What do you think of Google’s new search AI?

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