Google Launches Generative AI: What This Means for Search
Google has been enjoying an unthreatened, unworried monopoly in its search business since 1998. The search engine giant which accounts for more than 8.5 billion searches per day has been the primary station for people worldwide when it comes to searching for any query, any question, any idea, literally anything at all. Until ChatGPT rocked the world with its power to understand and respond in natural language. While Google fetches you different links to specific information, ChatGPT goes a step ahead and simply summarizes every answer out there and gives you one, in a conversational manner. Wonderful right?
The power of AI is insurmountable and several tech giants are hurdling to use it to provide more personalized service to users. In the same bid, Google has now revealed its new search engine model which will infuse the search results of user queries, with Generative AI.
What is Generative AI?
Generative AI is the latest subset of AI, in which the AI model generates new content or data which resembles the original content but is different from what is present in the training subset or data input. The AI is able to learn patterns from the data input set and then uses that knowledge to generate content that is similar but unique as well. It is being used in several domains like image manipulation and synthesis, data augmentation, gaming, and virtual reality, and in creating personalized content. Interestingly it has also been used in discovering drugs that are able to design a new molecule with the desired properties.
Thus, Generative AI is revolutionizing the frontiers of content processing and creation in natural language. This idea has come into vogue with Chat GPT, which uses this method to generate more conversational content for a search query and can even carry on a conversation.
While many have mistaken Google Assistant, Siri, or Alexa for using this same approach, the case is not the same.
These are voice assistants which do possess generative abilities but operate on other AI methodologies like natural language understanding, pre-designed conversational flows, and machine learning, which helps them to understand user queries, then extract relevant information, and finally provide appropriate responses. In short, they rely on a structured data source and pre-defined response templates to deliver results faster.
What does the future of search look like?
Google has revealed to use Generative AI to up their game of developing search engines, through Search Labs, which is undergoing experimentation. Using this, the search will render you snapshots of the key information in the response given to you in the search and even ask relevant follow-up questions. Clicking on them would take you to a new conversation. Thus with Search Generative Experiences (SGE), Google aspires to give more personalized content curation and search query results to users.
Hence, it is only a matter of time before other search engines shall also follow up on this revolutionary technology that gives users unmatched personalized responses the best.