Alex Heath and Ellis Hamburger interviewed Google's head of Search, Liz Reid, on Google's progression of AI into Search. It felt like a very candid interview that is worth listening to.
In short, Liz is still not sure if Gemini and Google Search will ever fully converge or not. She does see a lot of opportunity with personalization in Google Search. Slop, not just AI slop, is something Google has been fighting for a while.
Danny Goodwin at Search Engine Land also covered this.
Here is my video:
Here are my notes:
- Search was never really static before AI, i.e. knowledge graph, etc - search has changed a lot over the years.
- Google takes responsibility for the pace of change very seriously. So Google doesn’t want to change too much and make it hard but they also see a lot of opportunities with these new features. So labs, opt in, and slow roll out is common.
- People really picked up on AI Overviews very quickly
- AI Agents will do a lot of the work but it won’t be exclusive, only agents. People still want to hear from the source directly.
- Google will adapt to AI Agents like Google did for mobile
- Liz spoke about BERT, MUM, Google Lens, and other AI products
- Gemini vs Google Search: They share the underlining models together; and work together to improve the models for users. Gemini is more productivity or creation and search is more information based and connecting with the web.
- Liz doesn’t know if Gemini and Search ever converge or not.
- How people are using multiple tools is evolving, people are jumping from ChatGPT to Google to others.
- People are using other tools but still, Google Search is growing. It is not a zero sum game.
- Google Personal Intelligence is one of Google’s first step to personalizing responses to the user
- People have created a lot of slop before AI, AI just makes it much more scalable. So Google has a bunch of experience with this and spam.
- AI can create better content, and it also can create slop.
- Google has to fight the AI slop, to make sure to get the great content.
- Plus, publishers need to create great content.
- People are switching to user generated content, listening to more podcasts, etc. People are going to UGC over journalists.
- Google’s job is to surface that awesome content.
- Google can understand audio and video content well.
- Paid wall content, if allowed, Google can crawl it.
- Pay walls are also complicated for users, because some won’t pay.
- Search is able to find most of the content and new opportunities are being created with this new content.
- Liz mentioned preferred sources, so users can say they like a site and Google will show that site more often
- Google should also surface the publishers that user is paying for, not the others, if they have content that matches because that user have access to that content already.
- There is a real opportunity for personalization, to show content that user trusts
Forum discussion at X.
