Google Search is about to fundamentally change—for better or worse. To align with Alphabet-owned Google’s grand vision of artificial intelligence, and prompted by competition from AI upstarts like ChatGPT, the company’s core product is getting reorganized, more personalized, and much more summarized by AI.
At Google’s annual I/O developer conference in Mountain View, California, today, Liz Reid showed off these changes, setting her stamp early on in her tenure as the new head of all things Google search. (Reid has been at Google a mere 20 years, where she has worked on a variety of search products.) Her AI-soaked demo was part of a broader theme throughout Google’s keynote, led primarily by CEO Sundar Pichai: AI is now underpinning nearly every product at Google, and the company only plans to accelerate that shift.
“In the era of Gemini we think we can make a dramatic amount of improvements to search,” Reid said in an interview with WIRED ahead of the event, referring to the flagship generative AI model launched late last year. “People’s time is valuable, right? They deal with hard things. […]
Don’t like Google? I don’t. Its business model is to mine your personal data for patterns, and sell this to all willing buyers ( including the United States Government) so that targeted ads will follow you across platforms. Google is truly a vampiric model. Google stopped being useful well over a decade ago. There are many alternatives: Duck Duck Go, Avast, Opera, Tor, etc….Using these search engines in conjunction with a VPN will provide better protection. Interestingly enough, the United States government has been promoting the use of VPN (Virtual Private Networks which are encrypted) to populations such as Iran to get around government censorship. Isn’t it ironic that our population now needs to consider the use of this same technology to protect ourselves from government censorship.