• Nando Castelyn

  Tech editor

Google launched the most important catch-up-and-change in the company’s history. While it has been calling itself the “AI number one” company for years, now more than ever it needs to make that clear to users. With the most important achievement: a new method of research. The competition — with Microsoft and OpenAI leading the way — is fierce.

Although Google now consists of many different services, the search engine remains an indispensable part. Just because it brings in hundreds of billions of advertising dollars every year. It’s a very valuable piece of digital real estate.

Google’s answer came tonight: an experimental new way to search (unrelated to the chatbot Bard launched by Google).

It starts, as always, with research. Instead of seeing the familiar blue links supplemented with blocks of information from Wikipedia, for example, a new large field appears that takes up much of the search engine, as it were. In it, an answer to the question for which company is generated Generative research experience calls.

In addition, links are generated to a number of websites, which contain, as it were, “evidence” of the authenticity of the content, as explained by Google to The Verge technology website Outside. It also features a chatbot: you can also ask follow-up questions. But in a jacket from Google. So it is less similar to chat mode like ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing. And it remains Google, this version of the search engine also contains ads.

The search giant is taking it easy with this major change. Users must temporarily choose to participate in this experiment and must reside in the United States. But eventually it should become available to everyone who uses Google.

In addition, it does not provide standard answers to questions in the new format, but only if the system believes they are relevant. In any case, only traditional answers will be given to health questions and questions related to finances. And it must not have a character: there are no answers of the first form.

Another important message from Google is that artificial intelligence is a common thread through all kinds of services. The company announced earlier that generative AI will also be integrated into the company’s office applications and also compete with Microsoft in this field.

The service that’s also getting attention today is Google Photos. Soon you will be able to edit photos as if you were working in Photoshop. The most creative example was the image of a young child holding balloons, but not all balloons are visible. This is now possible with a new editing option.

The catch-up that Google is doing is very important to the company. Although the company is a pioneer in the field of AI research, after launching ChatGPT it did not immediately succeed in convincing the world to play a leading role in it. Especially since the company messed up while launching the chatbot Bard. Bard also fared poorly in comparison to Bing and ChatGPT.

In demonstrations provided by Google the edge And Washington PostThe new experimental search engine was subject to minor flaws. For example, he had an opinion about singer Adele and made mistakes in a recipe for making chocolate chip cookies.