it’s been 17 years Years later I was sitting in the prestigious weekly search quality meeting in the Ouagadougou conference room on Google’s Mountain View campus. That Thursday morning, about three dozen engineers, product managers and executives sat at a table or spread out on the floor to discuss why certain search queries or categories didn’t return the right results and suggest solutions. In 2010, those meetings led Google to make 550 changes to its search algorithm, a number that seemed impressive at the time.
That memory looks like a tintype. At Google’s I/O developer conference this week, a keynote speaker—Search chief Liz Reed—officially consigned good old-fashioned search to virtual oblivion. This was a continuation of a process that had begun two years earlier, when Google introduced “AI Overviews”, summaries that sit at the top of its search results page and are virtually hidden over the famous “10 blue links”. By then those links had already degraded, with the most relevant links often buried beneath aggregators, spam, and Google’s own shopping results and maps. Now, in what Reed described as the most significant change to the search box in the company’s history, users are in direct communication with the latest version of Google’s Gemini. Even the word “query” feels outdated, as human input is just the beginning of a conversation for AI to collaborate. This process may also include personal information that Google knows about you, which may be a lot. The answer to a question could be a specific presentation, possibly supported by AI agents that use digital backdoors to glean information. The transformation is complete. On stage, Google said loudly: “Google Search is AI search.”
The search box used to be a portal to the web. The new “intelligent” box is an invitation to order Gemini-powered, customized responses to user questions, sometimes creating a special mini-publication with charts, bullet points, and even animations. Google took pride in interpreting esoteric search terms in a manner consistent with the user’s divine purpose. Now it prompts explorers to interact with Gemini. To emphasize the change, Google representatives at the conference wore T-shirts reading “Ask me anything”, mirroring the prompt given by Gemini. Like the computerized version, if you asked these smiling associates for directions, the answer did not result in a click to a website.
Our digital lives are at an uncomfortable transition point these days. AI appears to be driving every business model, and giants like Google are incorporating AI into all of their products and operations. At the same time, resistance and even hatred is growing as this powerful and scary technology makes its way into our lives. When commencement speakers mention AI, just focus on its strengths. But as Google sees it, AI search – if you still want to call it that – is an inevitability that even AI haters will accept.
I was among those who held back from the introduction of the AI overview in 2024. Now I admit that the overview—and the deeper “AI mode” it encourages you to use—is simply better for many things, whether it’s detection or not. Saturday night Live There’s a new episode, getting an explanation of an agentic harness, or even finding a link. When I searched for my WIRED article where I described the meeting in Ouagadougou, the blue links were not useful. But when I explained in clear language what I was looking for, I found it immediately.
So it is working. Google claims that over a billion people per month are searching with AI mode, there is a separate tab on Google’s website where the links are even more peripheral. AI mode queries are doubling every quarter.
