During the company’s earnings call on Tuesday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated that Google Search is now on a “journey” around artificial intelligence. AI overviews, a contentious and significant change in the way Google provides information to its billions of search users, marked the beginning of that journey.
However, that was only the start.
“As AI continues to expand the universe of queries that people can ask, 2025 is going to be one of the biggest years for search innovation yet,”
said Pichai during his opening remarks on the call.
During the call, Pichai outlined Google’s next step in integrating AI capabilities from DeepMind the company’s research center, into Search. Slowly but surely, the Search product is starting to resemble an AI assistant that looks at websites, searches the internet, and provides a response.
A basic search system that provides you with ten blue links is a far cry from this.
Since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, which took the search behemoth off guard, Google has been on this trajectory for a few years. For websites that depend on Google traffic and companies that purchase ads on Google Search, the change has significant ramifications.
Although not everyone is pleased, Google is continuing to advance.
When asked about the future of AI and Search, Pichai stated “You can imagine the future with Project Astra,” as a reference to DeepMind’s multimodal AI system. That can also process live video from a camera or computer screen and answer user questions about what the AI sees in real time.
In other areas of its business, Google has great hopes for Project Astra. According to the company, Google will develop the operating system for augmented reality smart glasses that will eventually be powered by the multimodal AI system.
Pichai also highlighted a feature that might drastically change how people use Google Search: Gemini Deep Research, an AI agent that takes a few minutes to produce lengthy research reports. Deep Research uses Google Search to automate tasks that individuals have historically completed. However, it appears that Google now wishes to carry out such a study for users.
Pichai said
“You are really dramatically expanding the types of use cases for which Search can work – things which don’t always get answered instantaneously, but can take some time to answer,”. “Those are all areas of exploration, and you will see us putting new experiences in front of users through the course of 2025.”
