Google employees were shocked to learn in March that South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung is considering replacing Google with Microsoft’s Bing as the default search engine on its devices.
Bing had also been a search engine for many years. But it became a lot more interesting to industry insiders when it recently added new artificial intelligence technology.
Google’s response to Samsung’s threat was “panic,” according to internal reports reviewed by The New York Times. An estimated $3 billion in annual revenue was at stake with the Samsung contract. An additional $20 billion is tied to a similar Apple contract due for renewal this year.
AI competitors like the new Bing are quickly becoming the biggest threat to Google’s search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is racing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology. It is also in the process of upgrading the existing ones with AI features, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times.
The new features, under the project name Magi, are created by designers, engineers and executives who work in so-called sprint rooms to tweak and test the latest versions. The new search engine would provide users with a much more personalized experience than the company’s current service, which attempts to anticipate users’ needs.
Lara Levin, a spokeswoman for Google, said in a statement that “not every brainstorming deck or product idea leads to a launch, but as we’ve said before, we’re excited about introducing new AI-powered features to search, and will share more details soon.”
Billions of people use Google’s search engine every day for everything from finding restaurants and directions to understanding a medical diagnosis, and that simple white page with the company logo and a blank bar in the middle is one of the most-used web pages. in the world . Changes in it would have a significant impact on the lives of ordinary people, and until recently it was difficult to imagine anything against it.
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Google has been concerned about AI-powered competitors since OpenAI, a San Francisco start-up partnering with Microsoft, demonstrated a chatbot called ChatGPT in November. About two weeks later, Google created a task force in its search division to begin building AI products, said two people with knowledge of the efforts, who were not authorized to discuss them publicly.
Modernizing the search engine has become an obsession with Google, and the planned changes could introduce new AI technology into phones and homes around the world.
The Samsung threat represented the first potential crack in Google’s seemingly impregnable search business, which was worth $162 billion last year. While it wasn’t clear whether Microsoft’s work with AI was the main reason Samsung was considering a change after the past 12 years, that was the assumption within Google. The contract is being negotiated and Samsung could stay with Google.
But the idea that Samsung, which makes hundreds of millions of smartphones each year using Google’s Android software, would even consider switching search engines shocked Google employees.
After some workers were told the company was looking for volunteers this month to collect materials for a pitch to Samsung, they responded with emojis and amazement. “Wow, okay, that’s wild,” one person replied.
A Google spokesperson said the company was constantly improving its search engine to give partners more reason to choose Google, and that Android phone makers were free to embrace technologies from different companies to improve their users’ experience. improve.
Samsung and Microsoft declined to comment.
Google has been doing AI research for years. The DeepMind lab in London is considered one of the best AI research centers in the world and the company has pioneered AI projects such as self-driving cars and the so-called large language models used in chatbot development. In recent years, Google has used large language models to improve the quality of its search results, but has delayed the full adoption of AI because it is prone to generating false and biased statements.
Now the priority is gaining control of the next big thing in the industry. Last month, Google released its own chatbot Bard, but the technology received mixed reviews.
Plans for the new search engine, which demonstrate Google’s ambitions to reinvent the search experience, are still in the early stages, and there’s no clear timeline for when it will release the new search technology.
The system would learn what users want to know based on what they are looking for when they start using it. And it would provide lists of pre-selected options for items to buy, information for research, and other information. It would also be more conversational – kind of like chatting with a helpful person.
But long before the search engine can be rebuilt, the Magi project adds features to the existing search engine, according to internal documents. Google has more than 160 people working on it full-time, said a person with knowledge of the work.
Magi would keep ads in the mix of search results. Searches that can lead to a financial transaction, such as buying shoes or booking a flight, will still have ads on their results pages.
That’s important to Google, as search ads are its main way of making money. Its chatbot, Bard, contains no ads, and it was expected in the tech industry that AI responses to search engines could make ads less relevant to users.
The planned search additions can also answer software coding questions and write code based on a user’s request. Google may place an ad under the computer code answers, a document shows.
Last week, Google invited some employees to test Magi’s features, encouraging them to ask the search engine follow-up questions to assess its ability to hold a conversation. According to the planning document, Google is expected to release the tools to the public next month and add more features in the fall.
The company plans to release the features to up to one million people initially. That number should gradually increase to 30 million by the end of the year. The features will be available exclusively in the United States.
Google has also been exploring efforts to let people use Google Earth’s mapping technology using AI and search for music through a conversation with a chatbot, a Google executive wrote in a document.
Other product ideas are in various stages of development. A tool called GIFI is said to use AI to generate images in Google Image results. Another tool, Tivoli Tutor, would teach users a new language through open-ended AI text conversations.
Yet another product, Searchalong, allows users to ask a chatbot questions while browsing the web through Google’s Chrome browser. For example, people can ask the chatbot about activities near an Airbnb rental, and the AI will scan the page and the rest of the web for an answer.
Jim Lecinski, Google’s former vice president of sales and service, said the company was called to action and now needed to convince users that it was as “powerful, capable and contemporary” as its competitors.
“If we’re the leading search engine and this is a new attribute, a new feature, a new feature of search engines, we want to make sure we’re in this race as well,” said Mr. Lecinski, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University. , said in an interview.
Daisuke Wakabayashi, Karen Weise And Tripp Mickle reporting contributed.
