Microsoft’s Bing has long been a side note when it comes to search engines, languishing in relative obscurity, while Googling has been commonly used as a verb in casual conversation for decades. However, Microsoft partnering with OpenAI and pulling ahead in the generative AI race may make Bing more competitive, or at least make Google seriously consider it’s rival an innovator.
There has allegedly been some “panic” within Google around the subject of AI lately, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times. As a result, Google plans to integrate new AI features into search beginning next month for up to one million people in the U.S., the NYT article stated.
The big idea is that Google search would be more personalized once AI comes into play; it would also host the ads that make up the bulk of Google’s revenue. (Bard, Google’s entry into the generative AI field, does not integrate ads into its answers.) The proposed improvements to Google search would allow users to ask follow-up questions, refining or correcting their search as needed, while the AI keeps track of what was already said.
Google wants its search engine to be able to interpret and write code. Other ideas discovered in documents accessed by The New York Times include Google letting users make AI-generated pictures in image search, providing language-learning lessons through an AI chatbot, and answering questions at the same time as navigating Google Chrome. The search in the latter would take into account both the internet-wide search and the page the user is actively using.