Even If You Hate AI, You Will Use Google AI Search

It's been 17 years since I sat in on the iconic weekly search quality meeting in the Ouagadougou conference room at Google’s Mountain View campus. That Thursday morning, around 36 engineers, product managers and executives sat at a table or sprawled on the floor to discuss why certain search queries or categories did not yield a perfect result and to suggest fixes. In 2010, those meetings led Google to make 550 changes to its search algorithm, a number that seemed impressive at the time.

That memory seems like a tintype. At Google’s I/O developer conference this week, a keynote speaker—head of search Liz Reid—officially down-ranked good old-fashioned search to virtual oblivion. This was a continuation of a process that began two years ago, when Google introduced "AI Overview," its summaries that sit at the top of its search results page and literally lurk over the famous "10 blue links." By then those links had already been degraded, so that all too often the most relevant ones were buried beneath aggregators, spam and Google's own shopping results and maps.

Now, in what Reid described as the most significant change to the search box in the company's history, users are in direct communication with the latest version of Google's Gemini. Even the term "query" seems outdated, as human inputs are conversation starters for the AI to collaborate. The process can also incorporate personal information Google knows about you, which can be a lot. The answer to a query could be a bespoke presentation, maybe bolstered by AI agents that forage digital backroads to root out information. The transformation is complete. Onstage, Google said it out loud: "Google Search is AI Search."

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