I stopped using Google Search as my main search engine right in time for the AI revolution. That means I’ve hardly been exposed to the Search experiments that ultimately grew into AI Overviews. I’m yet to see the latter atop any Search results I might still perform, as they haven’t been available in the EU for that long.
Overall, I’ve also stopped experiencing the regular Google Search results. The one thing I miss about it is available to me in Google Maps. I couldn’t be happier with my decision, and I see no reason for returning to Google Search, especially since ChatGPT is my default genAI chatbot and not Gemini.
Sundar Pichai’s recent comments that Google Search will change dramaticalluy next year leave me unexcited given that. I can’t help but wonder how Google can make Google Search better, considering one very obvious roadblock it has to deal with, the antitrust loss in a case the US government successfully tried this year.
But my curiosity has nothing to do with actually wanting to use Google Search regularly again. It’s just that, curiosity about a product that seems unlikely to get better.
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The Google CEO said at the The New York Times Dealbook summit that Google Search will “change profoundly” in 2025. He added that Google will be able to “tackle more complex questions than ever before.”
“I think you’ll be surprised, even early in ’25, the kind of newer things Search can do compared to where it is today,” Pichai said.
As long as Google Search won’t advise putting glue on pizza, that will be a win. And no, this massive AI fumble will never be forgotten because we must not let ourselves lose sight of the fact that Google brought genAI to Search before said AI was ready.
That infamous fumble happened earlier this year when Google said it would do the googling for us. That was the point of AI Overviews: to offer quick, dependable information from the web. It failed at the key part that made Google Search so invaluable before the age of AI: Dependability.
The mishap also reminds us Google Search is essentially a massive money maker for Google. The decisions that impacted the Google Search experience in recent years were largely related to corporate greed.
Google will do everything it can to avoid Google Search’s bottom line being affected by competitors. In late 2022, when ChatGPT became viral, some people warned ChatGPT might kill Google Search. Google quickly pivoted to an AI-first strategy that dominated its actions in the last couple of years.
That same corporate greed is probably what turned Google into an online search monopolist.
A verdict in the aforementioned landmark case against Google says that Google is a monopolist. We’ll learn what Google has to do to fix the problem next year. The US government already asked Google to sell Chrome, which would be a massive blow to Google. The risk of selling Android is also on the table. Maybe next year’s massive Google Search change has something to do with that case.
However, I bet Pichai is hyping Google’s next AI developments for Google Search with these comments rather than alluding to a legal issue that could have massive implications for Google Search. It’s his job to do so. Aside from the government’s impact, AI is the only thing that can profoundly change Google Search.
If you’ve been using ChatGPT Plus in the second half of the year, and especially in the last few weeks, you might have noticed the improvements OpenAI gave to the chatbot after ChatGPT Search came out. ChatGPT Search is the big Google Search rival Google was (is?) afraid of, though OpenAI’s online search tool is hardly big.
If you ask me, the ChatGPT Search experience is better and cleaner than Google Search. I still question the accuracy of ChatGPT’s data and have trust issues with it, but the experience is miles better than Google Search. Is that what Pichai is teasing? We have no answer to that, only speculation.
The top Google exec also took hits at rivals in the AI space during the same chat, which suggests his Google Search remarks concern AI innovations.
For example, he said of Microsoft’s AI models that they’re someone else’s, without mentioning OpenAI or ChatGPT. This was a response to Satya Nadella’s comments earlier this year that Google should have been the clear winner in the AI field, but it turned out differently.
“When I look at what’s coming ahead, we are in the earliest stages of a profound shift,” Pichai said. “I just think there’s so much innovation ahead. We are committed to being at the state of the art in this field, and I think we are.”
Hype aside, we’ll have to see what Google actually does. OpenAI will own the news cycle for at least a couple of weeks by releasing new AI products every day for 12 days. I’d expect Google to announce its next-gen AI innovations in May at I/O 2025. But can Google wait that long?
