Google tests new AI Mode to handle more complicated queries

The Google Chrome website on a smartphone arranged in the Queens borough of New York, US, on Tuesday, Nov. 19, 2024. Top Justice Department antitrust officials have decided to ask a judge to force Alphabet Inc.'s Google to sell off its Chrome browser in what would be a historic crackdown on one of the biggest tech companies in the world. Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg

Alphabet Inc.’s Google will begin testing a new artificial intelligence-powered search mode, which lets people ask multipart questions — a preview of how its flagship product might evolve dramatically.

The new feature, known as AI Mode, runs several related searches in the background simultaneously, guessing what subtopics people will be interested in next and presenting one cohesive answer that summarizes multiple lines of inquiry, said Robby Stein, vice president of product for Google search, in an interview.

It will run in a separate tab from the main search landing page, which Stein said is ideal for when users are tackling more complex queries that are a poor fit for traditional keyword searches. Google’s early testing has shown that queries in AI mode are twice as long as normal searches, he said.

The feature “gives you information across the web and across all of the fresh information systems within Google,” Stein said. AI Mode can process text, images and video, and runs on Gemini 2.0, Google’s latest flagship AI model.

AI Mode comes almost a year after the company introduced generative AI to its main search engine with a product known as AI Overviews, which uses AI to answer users’ questions directly for some queries, above Google’s usual list of links. AI Mode, which will start rolling out to users who have signed up to test experimental features, is Google’s latest attempt to ensure the relevancy of its core business as OpenAI and other startups take aim at its market share.

AI Mode will be available first to people who pay for Google’s AI subscription package, a subtle twist in the business model for Google search, which has long been free to all users.

For many years, Google was reluctant to make major changes to search, which generated nearly 60% of the tech giant’s total revenue in the last quarter. But the popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT challenged whether searching the open internet with a simple text box was the best way to do things. It introduced the public to the idea of asking an AI system for answers in a conversational fashion. Other AI-powered search startups, including Perplexity and Anthropic, have since jumped into the market.

Google is still advantaged by its access to current information from content across the web, its shopping data for billions of products, and its Knowledge Graph, a vast database of information that has for years helped the search engine provide relevant answers.

By summarizing the internet’s information using AI, Google risks discouraging users from visiting web pages that create the content and bringing them revenue. Stein said AI Mode “presents an opportunity for websites to rank and for websites to be helpful to others.” But so far, Google’s push into AI-powered search has intensified concerns from some web creators about what AI summaries will mean for their traffic if users no longer have to visit their sites to get the information they were looking for.

In the same announcement, Google also said it would infuse AI Overviews with technology from the latest version of Gemini, its large language model, enabling users to ask tougher questions in fields like math and coding. The company will also open up the feature to teens.