Google is building a “brand new search engine” powered by its new AI technology while at the same time adding new AI-based features to its existing search engine under the project name Magi. “The new search engine will provide users with a much more personalized experience than the company’s current service, in an attempt to anticipate users’ needs,” The New York Times reports.
New Google search engine
Google has assigned a team of designers, engineers, and executives the responsibility of building this new search engine that “could put new AI technology into phones and homes around the world,” according to the report.
Google’s new search engine is still in its infancy, with no timeline for when it will be released. But this new effort “demonstrates Google’s ambitions to reimagine the search experience.”
The new search engine will learn what users want to know based on what they are searching for. In addition, it will “offer lists of predefined options for things to buy, information to search and other information”. At the same time, being more conversational, like talking to someone. Previous reports indicated that Google is talking about big changes to Google Search.
In 2009, Google attempted to highly personalize search results where in effect it said that all search results are personalized for all users. But a decade later, Google admitted that personalization did not provide much benefit to researchers. Customization in the search was very limited and backtracked significantly, away from the direct prior query and some localization based on user location. This may have been a privacy game, but here we are in a world where it now looks like Google may be losing market share to Microsoft Bing and other players.
Magi Project
While Google is working on a brand new search engine, a team of more than 160 full-time Googlers is working on adding new features to existing Google Search. This project is named Magi, according to these reports and may be released as early as next month for a subset of users.
According to the report, Magi will allow researchers to complete transactions, such as buying shoes or booking flights. This would allow searchers to complete financial transactions, all while still integrating existing search ads that Google search is making a huge profit from today.
These changes could allow researchers to answer questions about “software coding and user-driven code writing.” “Google may place an advertisement under the computer code answers, according to the document,” the report added.
Other Google projects
Google is also working on other efforts, including:
- AI-assisted Google Earth mapping technology and music search through a chatbot.
- GIFI AI will be used to generate images in Google Image results.
- Tivoli Tutor, will teach users a new language through open-ended AI text conversations.
- Searchalong, will allow users to ask a chatbot questions while browsing the web through Google’s Chrome browser.
Google spokeswoman Lara Levine told The New York Times that “Not every brainchild or product idea leads to a launch, but as we’ve said before, we’re excited to bring new AI-powered features to search, and will share more details soon.” A spokesperson said. In Google’s name, the company is constantly improving its search engine to give partners more reasons to choose Google, and that Android phone makers are free to adopt technologies from different companies to improve their users’ experience, The Times reported.
Why do we care
Watching how quickly Google changes and interacting with OpenAI and Microsoft has been interesting. Search is changing very quickly, and over the next several months it will be fascinating to see how search advertising, search engine optimization, and other forms of marketing change with it.
Stay tuned, and we will keep you posted on these changes.
