Google Search is about to see ‘a pretty dramatic shift’

• Google is rolling out a series of changes to Search, which will start on mobile.
• One update will change the way Search results appear for certain queries.
• A Google VP said the updates were “a pretty dramatic shift from where we were before.”

While Google Search’s AI Overviews may have gotten off to a rocky start, the company is making no bones about how it believes generative AI is the future of its core product.

The company just announced it would roll out a mishmash of new features that take Google Search even further from its traditional page of blue links. It will tap its Gemini artificial-intelligence models to change both how results appear and how users ask Google queries.

The most dramatic example is an entirely new Search experience that uses AI to organize the page’s layout, grouping results into different categories and pushing videos, forum links (think Reddit and Quora), and other widgets to the top of the page.

The result looks miles away from a single list of web pages.

“From a user perspective, this is a pretty dramatic shift from where we were before,” Rhiannon Bell, the vice president of user experience for Google Search, said in a roundtable with reporters.

For now, at least, Google sees this new search page as useful only for more-open-ended queries that AI Overviews can’t answer directly. That’s why, to begin with, it will activate only when users search for recipe ideas — though it plans to roll it out to other topics over time.

The new search page will be just on mobile for now, but there’s every reason to expect this to be the standard experience on phones and desktops across Search in the future.

“The main thing to know is that really we see this experience being amazing for exploration and inspiration,” Bell said. “And so it’s really where there’s no right answer.'”

She told Business Insider that it would be personalized based on location to start and that Google planned to tweak the dials and hone results based on other data points (it’s unclear what).

“We can start categorizing this content for you in ways that we previously could not have,” Bell said.

Of course, it leads to questions about how Google Search rankings — an ever-changing, ever-elusive algorithm — will work with these new formats. Search-engine-optimization specialists and publishers have been scrambling to make sense of Google’s AI Overviews, and these further changes will raise more questions about how websites get visibility in the generative-AI era.

It’s a difficult balancing act, but some good news for publishers: Google says it’s introducing hyperlinks into the AI Overview results. Until now, AI answers included links to the sources only underneath them, but now users will see links in the text that go directly to the source of the information. Google says early testing has shown increased traffic to the linked websites, though it declined to provide specific figures.

Google will also add ads to the AI Overviews, which will appear under answers where Google deems it “relevant to both the query and the answer provided,” a company blog said.

Using Google Lens to search

Google is upgrading Lens, a feature that uses a phone’s camera to search for information about what it sees.

Users can take a video and then ask Lens questions about the footage. For example, they might shoot a video of a bird and ask Lens to identify it, and Lens will spit out an AI-generated answer. Users can also simply point the camera at something and ask Lens a question using their voice in real time.

The additions seem like another step toward Google’s Project Astra demo from earlier this year, where the user in the video pointed their phone at various objects in a room and asked questions. The user was interacting with a chatbot built on Google’s Gemini, though the fundamental idea was the same: letting Google see and understand the world around you.

In addition, Google is bolstering its shopping features on Lens. Rather than just showing similar items when users point Lens at an object, it will now give more information when they search for an item, such as reviews and price comparisons across retailers.

“Today, 20% of all Google Lens searches are actually shopping-related, which is pretty interesting,” Lou Wang, Lens’ product director, said.

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