Why Google Is Making Its Biggest Change to Search

Oh, I think number one for sure.

You know, just to take a step back, AI is the best thing that's ever happened to search. And a lot of people are questioning that. A lot of people are saying, "Hey, what does AI mean for search?" And what we see, the vision of search is you should be able to ask whatever question is on your mind. And the way I think about that is we have probably thousands of questions that go through our head any given day. We ask maybe a few of them. Maybe we ask five of them. Maybe we ask 10 of them. Why do we not ask them all? Well, we don't know if there'll be a helpful response to it. Might be hard to ask that question. So our big idea is you should be able to ask anything and AI really supercharges that. AI enables people to ask whatever question is on their mind and get a helpful response. And so that's what we're pushing on.

What we're seeing with users is they're asking far more questions than they've ever asked before. They're getting the approach that we've taken. The approach that really defines what Google in search is doing with AI is that we're able to bring the best of the web together with the best of AI, where we're able to bring frontier AI capabilities built on our Gemini technology in close collaboration with DeepMind, and then we're able to bring that together with the web. So people can get links, they can discover content across the web, but they can also get helpful responses that contextualize the web and also give contextual responses that answer their question.

For us, it doesn't have to be about time. And to some extent attention, but we don't measure search by how many minutes are people spending on search. We measure search by how many queries are people doing, how many tasks are people doing. If it takes two queries to do a task instead of five queries to do a task, we would prefer that. We actually don't want people to do more queries in a way where they're thrashing and not getting a good experience, or spending more time because they're thrashing and not getting a good experience. That's not what we optimize for. We actually try to get people off Google as quickly as we can. That is one of the things that I think has been a hallmark of Google. We do want people to be doing more things with Google. If we can help people with twice as many of their questions as we could before, that's great. But they're doing more with Google because they're getting more done, rather than they're spending more time to get the same set of things done.

So we remain committed to Google organizing the web. That's a core part of what we do. And I would say relative to really any other company and really any other organization out there, we care about the web incredibly deeply. We're a company that started in the web. We're a company that still is deeply in the web. And so that is a bedrock commitment for us. And that leads to how we actually build our products as well. So for example, in search, it's not just AI, it's AI with links within the AI as well. We don't think users need to make a choice between AI or the web. But rather, we can bring both of those together in a really effective way. So we have lots of links within the AI responses. It's not just because of a commitment to the web. We also think it's really useful for users. Right? If you're interested in a topic, you want to go deep on a topic, you might get an AI summary, you might get an AI sort of overview to give you the context. But then, you want to read it more deeply. You want to see original reporting on the topic. You might want to see first-hand perspective. You might want to hear from someone who was actually there. You want to get that. You don't just want to hear from the AI. And so we're cognizant of that and we design around that. People are searching more than ever. People are searching for topics they were never searching for before. That all creates opportunities for websites to get discovered that never would have before. Right? If a user was never asking the question, the website never would have gotten traffic, never would have gotten a click. This is an expansionary moment, not just for search, but for the web overall.

I mean, this is what Google has been doing for years and years. It's what we've been doing for decades. We understand the web. We understand the web very well. We understand, you know, the very early days of PageRank was that you could use the citations across the web to understand what's more valuable than others. We've obviously built on that tremendously over time, but we understand the web well. We understand what's accurate on the web. We understand what's reliable. We understand what's trusted across the web. We're also able to understand when we get it right when we don't get it right because we're able to understand sort of metrics across our user populations. So for example, when we roll out a new AI experience within search, we know based on experiments, we run tests, and we can analyze those to see has this improved the experience or not. We only release changes that actually do improve the experience.

We are particularly careful on those types of questions. So if an election type of question, we're particularly careful, a finance type of question, a health kind of question. The way we approach that is in a few ways. Number one, if we don't think that the accuracy of the information is high enough, we won't show an AI response in that kind of a case. So that's the first level of it. The second is we invest incredibly heavily here. We focus particularly heavily in categories where the stakes are particularly high. And then the third piece is we're clear with users about what is AI generated, and we indicate, you know, AI can make mistakes so that users can be cognizant of that as well.

I think our advantage comes from deep expertise and a deep focus on innovation and continual reinvention. I think one of the maybe understated advantages that Google has is we've been through many disruptions before. We went through a mobile disruption. We arose in the web disruption. There was Ajax technologies. There was voice. There's been sort of time after time disruptions. Each time it would be, "Is this the Google killer?" And we have worked through those and we have really a playbook of how to work through those, which is lean into the innovation, innovate through the disruption with an excitement about what the technology can enable and a promise to build a better product for users through it. And I think that's a core advantage through any of these transformations, is to rely on that playbook.

Never. Because we've seen it before and we understand that if you stand still, if you don't innovate for users, you'll become irrelevant. And that's so clear. We know that time and time again. And so we see a new technology come along, we jump on it. We invent the new technologies in most cases. But we see it, we jump on it, and we know that if we innovate for users it will be expansionary. We know that our business will thrive through it.

We're seeing that users are loving it. And the best sign that we see is that queries are growing.