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Tag: search

  • Google Search’s New AI Overviews Will Soon Have Ads

    Google Search’s New AI Overviews Will Soon Have Ads

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    Last week Google introduced a radical shake-up of search that presents users with AI-generated answers to their queries. Now the company says it will soon start including ads inside those AI Overviews, as the automatic answers are called.

    Google on Tuesday announced plans to test search and shopping ads in the AI summaries, a move that could extend its dominance in search advertising into a new era. Although Google rapidly rolled out AI Overviews to all US English users last week after announcing the feature at its I/O developer conference, it’s unclear how widely or quickly ads will start appearing.

    Screenshots released by Google show how a user asking how to get wrinkles out of clothes might get an AI-generated summary of tips sourced from the web, with a carousel of ads underneath for sprays that purport to help crisp up a wardrobe.

    Google’s AI Overviews are meant to keep users from shifting to alternatives such as ChatGPT or the startup Perplexity, which use AI-generated text to answer many questions traditionally thrown at Google. How and when Google would integrate ads into AI Overviews has been a significant question over the company’s ChatGPT catch-up strategy. Search ads are the company’s largest revenue generator, and even subtle changes in ad placements or design can spur big swings in Google’s revenue.

    Courtesy of Google

    Google shared few details about its new Overview ad format in its announcement Tuesday. Ads “will have the opportunity to appear within the AI Overview in a section clearly labeled as ‘sponsored’ when they’re relevant to both the query and the information in the AI Overview,” Vidhya Srinivasan, Google’s vice president and general Manager for ads, wrote in a blog post.

    AI Overview will draw on ads from advertisers’ existing campaigns, meaning they can neither completely opt out of the experiment nor have to adapt the settings and designs of their ads to appear in the feature. “There’s no action needed from advertisers,” Srinivasan wrote.

    Google said last year when it started experimenting with AI-generated answers in search that ads for specific products would be integrated into the feature. In one example at the time, it showed a sponsored option at the top of an AI-generated list of kids’ hiking backpacks. Google says the early testing showed that users found ads above and below AI summaries helpful. Google’s much smaller rival Bing shows product ads in its Bing Copilot search chatbot, but in tests on Monday, WIRED didn’t trigger any ads in Bing’s competitor to AI Overview.

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  • How to Use ‘Circle to Search’ on an Android Phone

    How to Use ‘Circle to Search’ on an Android Phone

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    To enable Circle to Search on the Pixel phones, open up the main Settings page, then pick Display and Navigation mode. You’ve got two options here: Gesture or button navigation. Whichever you’re using, tap the gear icon next to the current mode, then turn on the Circle to Search toggle switch.

    Over on the Samsung Galaxy phones, open up Settings, then tap Display and Navigation bar. Again, you have the option to jump between the gesture and button navigation modes, but here there’s just one Circle to Search toggle switch that covers both modes. As long as it’s enabled, you can use Circle to Search.

    Using Circle to Search

    Smartphone screenshot

    You can scribble to search, if you prefer.

    Courtesy of David Nield

    Part of what makes Circle to Search so helpful is you can use it anywhere: In your web browser, in a social media feed, or in a text conversation. All you need to do is press and hold on the navigation handle or the home button at the bottom of the screen, depending on whether you’re using gesture or button navigation. The handle is a little harder to hit accurately, but you’ll get the hang of it. You’ll have to hold your finger there for a second or so; again, you’ll get the hang of the timing and it will become second nature.

    A blue tint covers the screen, and you’re ready to start circling. Although you wouldn’t know it by the name of the feature, you can either circle whatever you want to run a search on, or scribble over it, or just tap it. Whatever the method you use, your phone will try to work out what you want to select; for this reason, it works best for objects clearly distinguishable from their backgrounds.

    In addition to images, you can also search pieces of text, headlines, book titles, or entire paragraphs. It can even be used on math equations; tell your kids they can use it when they get stuck on their physics homework.

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  • How Google’s AI Overviews Work, and How to Turn Them Off (You Can’t)

    How Google’s AI Overviews Work, and How to Turn Them Off (You Can’t)

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    When can you expect your query to trigger an AI-generated summary of the results? “AI Overviews appear for complex queries,” says Mallory De Leon, a Google spokesperson. “You’ll find AI Overviews in your Google Search results when our systems determine that generative AI can be especially helpful–for example, when you want to quickly understand information from a range of sources.” During my initial tests, it felt like the AI Overviews popped up almost at random for queries, and the summaries appeared for simple questions as well as more complicated asks.

    According to De Leon, the AI Overview is powered by a customized version of Google’s Gemini model that’s supplemented with aspects of the company’s Search system, like the Knowledge Graph that has billions of general facts.

    Screenshot of Google Search

    For some AI Overview answers, the webpage links are immediately visible. For other AI Overviews, you have to click Show more to see where the information is coming from.

    Google via Reece Rogers

    One of my core hesitations about this feature as it rolls out is the continued potential for AI hallucinations, more commonly known as lies. When you interact with Google’s Gemini chatbot, a disclaimer at the bottom reads: “Gemini may display inaccurate info, including about people, so double-check its responses.” There’s no such disclaimer added to the bottom of the AI Overview, which often simply reads, “Generative AI is experimental.”

    When asked why there’s no mention of potential hallucinations for AI Overviews, De Leon emphasizes that Google wants to still offer high quality search results and mentions the company did adversarial red-teaming tests to uncover potential weak points for the feature.

    “This implementation of generative AI is rooted in Search’s core quality and safety systems, with built-in guardrails to prevent low-quality or harmful information from surfacing,” she says. “AI Overviews are designed to highlight information that can be easily verified by the supporting information that we surface.”

    Knowing this, you might still want to click through the webpage links to double check that the information is actually correct. Though it’s hard to imagine many users, who are often looking for quick answers, will spend extra time reading over the source material for Google’s AI-generated answer.

    Liz Reid, Google’s head of Search, recently told my colleague Lauren Goode that AI Overviews are expected to arrive for countries outside of the United States before the end of 2024, so over a billion people will likely soon encounter this new feature. As someone whose job relies on readers actually clicking links and spending time reading the articles, of course I’m apprehensive about this change—and I’m not alone.

    Beyond concerns from publishers, it also remains unclear what additional impacts might trickle down to users from Google’s AI Overviews. Yes, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other AI tools are quite popular in Silicon Valley tech circles, but this feature will likely expose billions of people, who have never used a chatbot before, to AI-generated text. Even though AI Overviews are designed to save you time, they might lead to less trustworthy results.

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  • Google Search Is Growing Up

    Google Search Is Growing Up

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    Google held its annual I/O developer event this week. The company gathered software developers, business partners, and folks from the technology press at Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California, just down the road from Google corporate headquarters for a two-hour presentation. There were Android announcements, there were chatbot announcements. Somebody even blasted rainbow-colored robes into the crowd using a T-shirt cannon. But most of the talk at I/O centered around artificial intelligence. Nearly everything Google showed off at the event was enhanced in some way by the company’s Gemini AI model. And some of the most shocking announcements came in the realm of AI-powered search, an area where Google is poised to upend everyone’s expectations about how to find things on the internet—for better or for worse.

    This week, WIRED senior writer Paresh Dave joins us to unpack everything Google announced at I/O, and to help us understand how search engines will evolve for the AI era.

    Show Notes

    Read our roundup of everything Google announced at I/O 2024. Lauren wrote about the end of search as we know it. Will Knight got a demo of Project Astra, Google’s visual chatbot. Julian Chokkattu tells us about all the new features coming to Android phones, Wear OS watches, and Google TVs.

    Recommendations

    Michael Calore is @snackfight. Lauren is @LaurenGoode. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

    How to Listen

    You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how:

    If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, and search for Gadget Lab. If you use Android, you can find us in the Google Podcasts app just by tapping here. We’re on Spotify too. And in case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.



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  • Everything Google Announced at I/O 2024: Gemini, Search, Project Astra, Scam Detection

    Everything Google Announced at I/O 2024: Gemini, Search, Project Astra, Scam Detection

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    Google also showed off its new DJ Mode in MusicFX, an AI music generator that lets musicians generate song loops and samples based on prompts. (DJ mode was shown off during the eccentric and delightful performance by musician Mark Rebillet that led into the I/O keynote.)

    An Evolution in Search

    From its humble beginning as a search-focused company, Google is still the most prominent player in the search industry (despite some very good, slightly more private options). Google’s newest AI updates are a seismic shift for its core product.

    New contextual awareness abilities help Google search deliver more relevant results.

    Courtesy of Google

    Some new capabilities include AI-organized search, which allows for more tightly presented and readable search results, as well as the ability to get better responses from longer queries and searches with photos.

    We also saw AI overviews, which are short summaries that pool information from multiple sources to answer the question you entered in the search box. These summaries appear at the top of the results so you don’t even need to go to a website to get the answers you’re seeking. These overviews are already controversial, with publishers and websites fearing that a Google search that answers questions without the user needing to click any links may spell doom for sites that already have to go to extreme lengths to show up in Google’s search results in the first place. Nonetheless, these newly enhanced AI overviews are rolling out to everyone in the US starting today.

    A new feature called Multi step reasoning lets you find several layers of information about a topic when you’re searching for things with some contextual depth. Google used planning a trip as an example, showing how searching in Maps can help find hotels and set transit itineraries. It then went on to suggest restaurants and help with meal planning for the trip. You can deepen the search by looking for specific types of cuisine, or vegetarian options. All of this info is presented to you in an organized way.

    Advanced visual search in Lens.

    Courtesy of Google

    Lastly, we saw a quick demo of how users can rely on Google Lens to answer questions about whatever they’re pointing their camera at. (Yes, this sounds similar to what Project Astra does, but these capabilities are being built into Lens in a slightly different way.) The demo showed a woman trying to get a “broken” turntable to work, but Google identified that the record player’s tonearm simply needed adjusting, and it presented her with a few options for video and text-based instructions on how to do just that. It even properly identified the make and model of the turntable through the camera.

    WIRED’s Lauren Goode talked with Google head of search Liz Reid about all the AI updates coming to Google Search, and what it means for the internet as a whole.

    Security and Safety

    Image may contain Text Business Card Paper and White Board

    Scam Detection in action.

    Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

    One of the last noteworthy things we saw in the keynote was a new scam detection feature for Android, which can listen in on your phone calls and detect any language that sounds like something a scammer would use, like asking you to move money into a different account. If it hears you getting duped, it’ll interrupt the call and give you an on-screen prompt suggesting that you hang up. Google says the feature works on the device, so your phone calls don’t go into the cloud for analysis, making the feature more private. (Also check out WIRED’s guide to protecting yourself and your loved ones from AI scam calls.)

    Google has also expanded its SynthID watermarking tool meant to distinguish media made with AI. This can help you detect misinformation, deepfakes, or phishing spam. The tool leaves an imperceptible watermark that can’t be seen with the naked eye, but can be detected by software that analyzes the pixel-level data in an image. The new updates have expanded the feature to scan content on the Gemini app, on the web, and in Veo-generated videos. Google says it plans to release SynthID as an open-source tool later this summer.

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  • It’s the End of Google Search As We Know It

    It’s the End of Google Search As We Know It

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    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. If you have an opportunity with technology to help people get answers to their questions, to take more of the work out of it, why wouldn’t we want to go after that?”

    Google AI

    Google’s new search features make it possible to use video and voice to make complex queries.

    Courtesy of Google

    It’s as though Google took the index cards for the screenplay it’s been writing for the past 25 years and tossed them into the air to see where the cards might fall. Also: The screenplay was written by AI.

    These changes to Google Search have been long in the making. Last year the company carved out a section of its Search Labs, which lets users try experimental new features, for something called Search Generative Experience. The big question since has been whether, or when, those features would become a permanent part of Google Search. The answer is, well, now.

    Google’s search overhaul comes at a time when critics are becoming increasingly vocal about what feels to some like a degraded search experience, and for the first time in a long time, the company is feeling the heat of competition, from the massive mashup between Microsoft and OpenAI. Smaller startups like Perplexity, You.com, and Brave have also been riding the generative AI wave and getting attention, if not significant mindshare yet, for the way they’ve rejiggered the whole concept of search.

    Automatic Answers

    Google says it has made a customized version of its Gemini AI model for these new Search features, though it declined to share any information about the size of this model, its speeds, or the guardrails it has put in place around the technology.

    This search-specific spin on Gemini will power at least a few different elements of the new Google Search. AI Overviews, which Google has already been experimenting with in its labs, is likely the most significant. AI-generated summaries will now appear at the top of search results.

    One example from WIRED’s testing: In response to the query “Where is the best place for me to see the northern lights?” Google will, instead of listing web pages, tell you in authoritative text that the best places to see the northern lights, aka the aurora borealis, are in the Arctic Circle in places with minimal light pollution. It will also offer a link to NordicVisitor.com. But then the AI continues yapping on below that, saying “Other places to see the northern lights include Russia and Canada’s northwest territories.”

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  • Google Thinks It Can Cash In on Generative AI. Microsoft Already Has

    Google Thinks It Can Cash In on Generative AI. Microsoft Already Has

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    Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai is confident that Google will find a way to make money selling access to generative AI tools. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says his company is already doing it.

    Both companies reported better-than-expected quarterly sales and profit on Thursday. And the stock prices of both soared on the results, with Alphabet further buoyed by its new plans to buy back more shares and issue its first-ever dividend.

    But the near-term fortunes of Microsoft and Google, at least as far as their generative AI efforts are concerned, look different under the hood and in the comments of their executives. How investors, workers, and potential customers perceive the rivals’ dueling efforts could determine which gets the better chunk of the hundreds of billions of dollars in spending expected to flow to such software in the coming years.

    In a call with financial analysts on Thursday, Nadella touted that Microsoft now has 1.8 million customers for GitHub Copilot, a generative AI tool that helps engineers write software code. That’s up from 1.3 million customers a quarter ago.

    Among Fortune 500 companies, 60 percent are using Copilot for Microsoft Office 365, a virtual assistant that uses generative AI to help workers write emails and documents, and 65 percent are using a Microsoft Azure Cloud service that enables them to access generative AI software from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. “Azure has become a port of call for pretty much anybody who is doing an AI project,” Nadella said. The $13 billion dollars Microsoft has invested in OpenAI has certainly helped win those clients.

    The buzz of interest in AI services helped drive revenue for Microsoft’s biggest unit–cloud services–up by seven percentage points compared to a year ago, and Microsoft’s overall sales rose 17 percent to nearly $62 billion. It also gained cloud market share, Nadella added. The number of $100 million cloud deals that Microsoft landed increased 80 percent during the quarter compared to the same period a year ago and $10-million deals doubled.

    Alphabet’s Pichai’s had milestones to boast about too. He told analysts in a separate call that more than 1 million developers are using Google Cloud’s generative AI tools and that 60 percent of generative AI startups backed by investors are Google Cloud customers. Generative AI is also boosting the ad campaigns of Google’s advertising clients.

    But Pichai didn’t say how many signups Google had drawn to Gemini Advanced, a $20 per month subscription plan announced in February that provides access to the company’s most advanced AI chatbot.

    On Google’s core business of search, Pichai didn’t share revenue figures related to experiments to summarize query results using generative AI. By providing more direct answers to searchers, Google could end up with fewer opportunities to show search ads if people spend less time doing additional, more refined searches. The types of ads Google does show also could have to shift.

    While Pichai said the tests show that users exposed to generative AI-powered search are doing more searches, they are also potentially less profitable for Google because the underlying technology to power more advanced searchers is costlier than operating its longstanding systems.

    Picahi expressed little concern on either front. “We are very, very confident we can manage the cost of how to serve these queries,” he said. “I am comfortable and confident that we’ll be able to manage the monetization transition here as well. It will play out over time.”

    Alphabet’s overall sales rose 15 percent to nearly $81 billion.

    It spent about the same about the same amount—-around $12 billion—as Microsoft investing in infrastructure like servers and datacenters last quarter. But the results and comments on Thursday suggest that Microsoft is further along in delivering a payoff.

    For now, shareholders are giving both companies leeway. At the close of Thursday, Microsoft shares were up 35 percent over the past year, and Alphabet 51 percent over the past year. They are both at or near all-time highs. But if customers keep flocking to Copilot and the prospects for Gemini and Google search don’t grow more clear, the trendlines soon could diverge.

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  • Perplexity’s Founder Was Inspired by Sundar Pichai. Now They’re Competing to Reinvent Search

    Perplexity’s Founder Was Inspired by Sundar Pichai. Now They’re Competing to Reinvent Search

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    Aravind Srinivas credits Google CEO Sundar Pichai for giving him the freedom to eat eggs.

    Srinivas remembers the moment seven years ago when an interview with Pichai popped up in his YouTube feed. His vegetarian upbringing in India had excluded eggs, as it had for many in the country, but now, in his early twenties, Srinivas wanted to start eating more protein. Here was Pichai, a hero to many aspiring entrepreneurs in India, casually describing his morning: waking up, reading newspapers, drinking tea—and eating an omelet.

    Srinivas shared the video with his mother. OK, she said: You can eat eggs.

    Pichai’s influence reaches far beyond Srinivas’ diet. He too is CEO of a search company, called Perplexity AI, one of the most hyped-up apps of the generative AI era. Srinivas is still taking cues from Pichai, the leader of the world’s largest search engine, but his admiration is more complicated.

    “It’s kind of a rivalry now,” Srinivas says. “It’s awkward.”

    Srinivas and Pichai both grew up in Chennai, India, in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu—though the two were born 22 years apart. By the time Srinivas was working toward his PhD in computer science at UC Berkeley, Pichai had been crowned chief executive of Google.

    For his first research internship, Srinivas worked at Google-owned DeepMind in London. Pichai also got a new job that year, becoming CEO of Alphabet as well as Google. Srinivas found the work at DeepMind invigorating, but he was dismayed to find that the flat he had rented sight unseen was a disaster—a “crappy home, with rats,” he says—so he sometimes slept in DeepMind’s offices.

    He discovered in the office library a book about the development and evolution of Google, called In the Plex, penned by WIRED editor at large Steven Levy. Srinivas read it over and over, deepening his appreciation of Google and its innovations. “Larry and Sergey became my entrepreneurial heroes,” Srinivas says. (He offered to list In the Plex’s chapters and cite passages from memory; WIRED took his word for it.)

    Shortly afterwards, in 2020, Srinivas ended up working at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, as a research intern working on machine learning for computer vision. Slowly, Srinivas was making his way through the Google universe, and putting some of his AI research work to good use.

    Then, in 2022, Srinivas and three cofounders—Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski—teamed up to try and develop a new approach to search using AI. They started out working on algorithms that could translate natural language into the database language SQL, but determined this was too narrow (or nerdy). Instead they pivoted to a product that combined a traditional search index with the relatively new power of large language models. They called it Perplexity.

    Perplexity is sometimes described as an “answer” engine rather than a search engine, because of the way it uses AI text generation to summarize results. New searches create conversational “threads” on a particular topic. Type in a query, and Perplexity responds with follow up questions, asking you to refine your ask. It eschews direct links in favor of text-based or visual answers that don’t require you to click away to somewhere else to get information.

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  • Apple's MM1 AI Model Shows a Sleeping Giant Is Waking Up

    Apple's MM1 AI Model Shows a Sleeping Giant Is Waking Up

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    A research paper quietly released by Apple describes an AI model called MM1 that can answer questions and analyze images. It’s the biggest sign yet that Apple is developing generative AI capabilities.

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  • Google Is Finally Trying to Kill AI Clickbait

    Google Is Finally Trying to Kill AI Clickbait

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    Google is taking action against algorithmically generated spam. The search engine giant just announced upcoming changes, including a revamped spam policy, designed to keep AI clickbait out of its search results.

    “It sounds like it’s going to be one of the biggest updates in the history of Google,” says Lily Ray, senior director of SEO at the marketing agency Amsive. “It could change everything.”

    In a blog post, Google claims the change will reduce “low-quality, unoriginal content” in search results by 40 percent. It will focus on reducing what the company calls “scaled content abuse,” which is when bad actors flood the internet with massive amounts of articles and blog posts designed to game search engines.

    “A good example of it, which has been around for a little while, is the abuse around obituary spam,” says Google’s vice president of search, Pandu Nayak. Obituary spam is an especially grim type of digital piracy, where people attempt to make money by scraping and republishing death notices, sometimes on social platforms like YouTube. Recently, obituary spammers have started using artificial intelligence tools to increase their output, making the issue even worse. Google’s new policy, if enacted effectively, should make it harder for this type of spam to crop up in online searches.

    This notably more aggressive approach to combating search spam takes specific aim at “domain squatting,” a practice in which scavengers purchase websites with name recognition to profit off their reputations, often replacing original journalism with AI-generated articles designed to manipulate search engine rankings. This type of behavior predates the AI boom, but with the rise of text-generation tools like ChatGPT, it’s become increasingly easy to churn out endless articles to game Google rankings.

    The spike in domain squatting is just one of the issues that have tarnished Google Search’s reputation in recent years. “People can spin up these sites really easily,” says SEO expert Gareth Boyd, who runs the digital marketing firm Forte Analytica. “It’s been a big issue.” (Boyd admits that he has even created similar sites in the past, though he says he doesn’t do it anymore.)

    In February, WIRED reported on several AI clickbait networks that used domain squatting as a strategy, including one that took the websites for the defunct indie women’s website The Hairpin and the shuttered Hong Kong-based pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily and filled them with AI-generated nonsense. Another transformed the website of a small-town Iowa newspaper into a bizarro repository for AI blog posts on retail stocks. According to Google’s new policy, this type of behavior is now explicitly categorized by the company as spam.

    In addition to domain squatting, Google’s new policy will also focus on eliminating “reputation abuse,” where otherwise trustworthy websites allow third-party sources to publish janky sponsored content or other digital junk. (Google’s blog post describes “payday loan reviews on a trusted educational website” as an example.) While the other parts of the spam policy will start enforcement immediately, Google is giving 60 days notice prior to cracking down on reputational abuse, to give websites time to fall in line.

    Nayak says the company has been working on this specific update since the end of last year. More broadly, the company has been working on ways to fix low-quality content in search, including AI-generated spam, since 2022. “We’ve been aware of the problem,” Nayak says. “It takes time to develop these changes effectively.”

    Some SEO experts are cautiously optimistic that these changes could restore Google’s search efficacy. “It’s going to reinstate the way things used to be, hopefully,” says Ray. “But we have to see what happens.”

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