Buckle up, again? Google Search will continue to change profoundly in 2025, according to Alphabet/Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who was interviewed during the 2024 New York Times DealBook Summit.
Google Search in 2025. Typically elusive on substance and details, here’s the quote from Pichai:
“Search itself will continue to change profoundly in [2025]. I think we are going to be able to tackle more complex questions than ever before. I think you’ll be surprised even early in [2025] the kind of newer things search can do compared to where it is today.”
Pichai said the company applied AI most aggressively in search:
“The gaps in search quality [were] all based on transformers. Internally, we call it BERT and MUM and you know we made search multimodal, the search quality improvements. We were improving the language understanding of search. That’s why we built transformers in the company.
“If you look at the last couple of years, we have, with AI overviews, Gemini is being used by over a billion users in search alone. I just feel like we are getting started.”
Why we care. Search has profoundly changed since the rise of generative AI in late 2022. In April 2023, Pichai said Search would continue to evolve substantively over the next decade and earlier this year said search would continue to evolve toward Search Generative Experience, the predecessor of AI Overviews.
Content flood. In a world in which you’re flooded with so much content, Pichai argued that Google search becomes even more valuable:
“If anything, I think something like search becomes more valuable. In a world in which you’re inundated with content, you’re trying to find trustworthy content. Content that makes sense to you in a way reliably you can use it. I think it becomes more valuable.
“… Look, information is the essence of humanity. We’ve been on a curve on information. When Facebook came around, people had entirely new way of getting information. YouTube Facebook… I can keep going on and on. I think the problem with a lot of those constructs is they are zero sum in their inherent outlook. They just feel like people are consuming information in a certain limited way and people are all dividing that up. But that’s not the reality of what people are doing.
Traffic and fair use. There was also an interesting exchange where the interviewer, Andrew Ross Sirkin, tried to push Pichai on whether Google is providing enough credit and traffic to content creators. Pichai clearly had nothing to say about the search side, so he pivoted away to focus on YouTube creators rather than websites. Here are those exchanges:
Sorkin: You have more content than anybody… The value of that content. You have my emails on Gmail. You have, if I’ve uploaded video or somebody else has uploaded video about me on YouTube. I’m sure people have cut and pasted articles that I’ve written or other things. How should we think about that and the value of it. You know it’s very interesting because if you were going to write a book, you could go to the library and maybe read 30 books. You could maybe go buy some other books and you could take all that information in your head and hopefully you footnote it or put in the bibliography. But you could probably only do that once. It’d be very hard for you to take all the information to learn it and then spit it out a million times. You get to spit it out a million times a day. I just wonder what the economics of that should be for the folks that create it in the beginning.
Pichai: …While it’s often debated, we spend a lot of time thinking about the traffic we send to the ecosystem. Even through the moment through the transition over the past couple of years. It’s an important priority for us.
…I think there’s always going to be a balance between understanding what is fair use when a new technology comes versus how do you give value back proportionate to the value of the IP – the hard work people have put in.
Sorkin: But you think there should be different rules around fair use in the in the AI era?