How Google Will Forever Change Search

Although Google may be involved in an ongoing antitrust case, the tech giant has shown impressive profitability in the recent third quarter. Google's parent company, Alphabet, achieved an 11% revenue growth, returning to double-digit growth levels after a year. CEO Sundar Pichai not only expressed satisfaction with the results but also emphasized the strong growth of the "search" function, which is the biggest contributor to revenue growth.

By introducing artificial intelligence capabilities into Search Generated Experiences (SGE), Google is changing the direction of search functionality development.

SGE Leading the Way

Google continues to dominate the search engine market and is still developing new features to drive growth. Google has 8.5 billion searches per day, capturing 90% of the search engine market share, far ahead of its competitors. And they don't stop there.

In the recent earnings call, Google mentioned the integration of generative AI with search. SGE is currently available in the United States, Japan, and India, and can handle a wider range of queries from multiple angles. Google has also started linking to a broader range of sources on search result pages to promote content discovery. Interestingly, their improved search functionality will increase advertising revenue.

Tight Integration of Search and Advertising

In May of this year, Google launched SGE in the United States as an AI integration experiment conducted in the search lab to gather user feedback and further improvements. This experiment seems to have been successful, and Pichai is pleased with the positive feedback from SGE users and confirmed its expansion to more users. Interestingly, advertising accounted for $59.65 billion of the $76.69 billion in revenue for the third quarter.

Pichai also emphasized the continued importance of advertising in the new search experience. Google will continue to experiment with new ad formats in SGE to provide relevant, high-quality customized ads at every stage of the search process. Beth Kindig, Chief Technical Analyst at I/O, stated that SGE will provide better return on investment for advertisers.

Google's search revenue reached $44 billion, an 11.3% year-on-year growth, the highest growth rate since the second quarter of 2022.

In May's I/O event, Google announced plans to introduce advertising in SGE. Google aims to integrate ads into AI-powered search, similar to how Microsoft incorporates ads into its AI-driven Bing chat. Google wants to make the platform more complete. Google is also building generative AI templates that combine the capabilities of LLM with Google APIs for use in specific industries such as travel.

More to Come

Google is committed to improving its existing search experience, while its large language model, Bard, continues to evolve. Recently, Google launched browser extension features for Google applications such as YouTube, Google Flights, Google Maps, Google Drive, Google Docs, and Gmail. Additionally, Google announced the integration of Bard into Google Assistant to provide a more intuitive, intelligent, and personalized digital assistant.

Although OpenAI recently achieved full multimodality, allowing voice and image inputs, and even released updates that allow uploading files in any format (including PDFs), Bard already had multimodal capabilities before that. Furthermore, Pichai mentioned the highly anticipated "Gemini project." He said, "I'm very excited about the progress we're making, and we're working hard to prepare the model." He also hinted that the project will be multimodal and have "efficient tools and API integration."

With artificial intelligence as a focus for major tech companies, the future development path will undoubtedly be filled with AI-oriented development and integration. Search is a major revenue driver, and Google's efforts to improve the search experience are undeniable.