Google Devising Radical Search Changes This Time To Beat AI Rivals

Google has been concerned about AI-powered competitors ever since OpenAI demonstrated a chatbot called ChatGPT in November.

When Google employees learned in March that South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung was considering replacing Google with Microsoft's Bing as the default search engine on its devices, they were shocked.

For years, Bing was also a search engine-driven. But it got even more interesting to industry insiders when it recently added new artificial intelligence technology.

Google's response to Samsung's threat was "panic," according to internal messages reviewed by The New York Times. An estimated $3 billion in annual revenue was at stake with the Samsung contract. An additional $20 billion is tied to a similar Apple contract that will be up for renewal this year.

AI competitors like the new Bing are fast becoming the most serious threat to Google's search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is rushing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology. It is also upgrading existing ones with AI features, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times.

The new features, under the project name Maggie, are being built by designers, engineers and executives working in so-called sprint rooms to tweak and test the latest versions. The new search engine will provide users with a more personalized experience than the company's existing service, while attempting to anticipate users' needs.

Google spokeswoman, Lara Levin, said in a statement that "not every brainstorm deck or product idea leads to a launch, but as we've said before, we're open about bringing new AI-powered features to Search." Excited, and will share more details soon.

Billions of people use Google's search engine every day for everything from finding restaurants and directions to understanding medical diagnoses, and that simple white page with the company's logo and a blank bar in the middle is one of the most widely used search engines in the world. One of the web pages used is . Changes in this would have a significant impact on the lives of ordinary people, and until recently it was hard to imagine anything challenging it.

A New Generation of Chatbots

A brave new world. A new crop of artificial intelligence-powered chatbots has ignited a scramble to determine whether the technology can upend the economics of the internet, turn today's powerhouses into has-beens and become the industry's next giants. can build. Here are the bots to know: 

ChatGTP. ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence language model from OpenAI, a research lab, has been making headlines since November for its ability to answer complex questions, write poetry, generate code, plan vacations and translate languages. GPT-4, the latest version introduced in mid-March, can also respond to images (and ace the Uniform Bar test).

Bing. Two months after ChatGPT's debut, Microsoft, OpenAI's primary investor and partner, added a similar chatbot to its Bing Internet search engine, capable of holding open-ended text conversations on virtually any topic. But it was the bot's occasionally incorrect, confusing and strange responses that attracted much attention after its release.

Bard. Google's chatbot, called Bard, was released in March to a limited number of users in the United States and Britain. Originally conceived as a creative tool designed for drafting emails and poems, it can generate ideas, write blog posts and answer questions with facts or opinions.

Ernie. Search giant Baidu unveiled China's first major rival to ChatGPT in March. Ernie's introduction to Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration proved a flop after the bot's promised "live" performance was recorded. {alertSuccess}

Google has been worried about AI-powered competitors ever since OpenAI, a San Francisco start-up working with Microsoft, demonstrated a chatbot called ChatGPT in November. About two weeks later, Google created a task force in its search division to start building AI products, said two people with knowledge of the efforts, who were not authorized to discuss them publicly.

Modernizing its search engine has become an obsession at Google, and the planned changes could bring new AI technology to phones and homes all over the world.

ChatGPT upended the technology industry when OpenAI introduced it in November.

Samsung's threat represented the first potential crack at Google's seemingly impregnable search business, which was worth $162 billion last year. While it wasn't clear whether Microsoft's work with AI was the main reason Samsung was considering a change after the past 12 years, that was the assumption inside Google. Contract negotiations are ongoing, and Samsung may remain with Google.

But the idea that Samsung, which makes hundreds of millions of smartphones with Google's Android software each year, would even consider changing the search engine shocked Google employees.

Microsoft Bing is a web search engine owned and operated by Microsoft.

When some employees were told the company was looking for volunteers this month to help Samsung prepare content for the pitch, they reacted with emojis and surprise. "Wow, well that's wild," one person replied.

A Google spokesperson said that the company was constantly improving its search engine to give users and partners more reasons to choose Google, and that Android phone makers were looking to adopt technologies from different companies to improve their users' experience. 

Google’s Bard chatbot, released in March, received mixed reviews.

Samsung and Microsoft declined to comment.

Google has been doing AI research for years. Its DeepMind lab in London is considered one of the best AI research centers in the world, and the company has been a pioneer with AI projects, such as self-driving cars and so-called large language models used in development. Chatbot. In recent years, Google has used large language models to improve the quality of its search results, but has held off on fully adopting AI because it has been prone to generate false and biased statements.

The priority now is to win control of the industry's next big thing. Last month, Google released its own chatbot, Bard, but the technology has received mixed reviews.

Ernie: Search giant Baidu unveiled China's first major rival to ChatGPT in March. 

Plans for the new search engine, which reflect Google's ambitions to re-imagine the search experience, are still in the early stages with no clear timetable for when it will release the new search technology.

The system will learn what users want to know, what they're looking for when they start using it. And it will provide a list of pre-selected options for items to buy, information to research, and more. It'll also be more interactive - more like chatting with a helpful person.

But long before the search engine can be rebuilt, Project Magie will add features to the existing search engine, according to internal documents. A person with knowledge of this work told that more than 160 people are working full time on Google.

Maggie will place the ads in the mix of search results. For example, search queries that could lead to financial transactions, for example, buying shoes or booking a flight, would still show ads on their results pages.

This is important to Google, as search advertising is its primary way of making money. Its chatbot, Bard, does not feature ads, and there has been speculation in the tech industry that AI's answers to search engines could make ads less relevant to users.

Planned search additions can also answer questions about software coding and writing code based on user requests. According to the document, Google can place an ad under computer code answers.

Last week, Google invited some employees to test Maggie's features, and it encouraged them to ask the search engine follow-up questions to judge its ability to interact. According to the planning document, Google hopes to release the tool to the public next month and add more features in the fall.

The company is initially planning to release the features for up to one million people. This number should progressively increase to 30 million by the end of the year. The features will be available exclusively in the United States.

Google has also explored efforts to help people find music using Google Earth's mapping technology and through interactions with chatbots, Google wrote in a document.

Other product ideas are in various stages of development. The tool, called GIFI, will use AI to generate images in Google image results. Another tool, Tivoli Tutor, will teach users a new language through open-ended AI text conversations.

Yet another product, SearchLong, will let users ask chatbot questions while surfing the web through Google's Chrome browser. For example, people can ask the chatbot for activities near Airbnb rentals, and the AI will scan the page and the rest of the Internet for a response.

Jim Lesinski, a former Google vice president of sales and service, said the company was spurred into action and now had to convince users that it was as "powerful, capable and contemporary" as its competitors.

"If we're going to be the leading search engine and this is a new feature, a new feature, a new feature of search engines, we want to make sure we're in this race as well," Mr. Lesinski, a professor of marketing at Northwestern at the university, said in an interview.