Google I/O is this Wednesday, and while I/O often does not have much core search news, this year, we expect that to change with Google demonstrating and hopefully launching new AI-powered features within Google Search. “Google plans to make its search engine more “visual, snackable, personal, and human,” with a focus on serving young people globally, according to the documents,” reported the Wall Street Journal.
Moving away from ten blue links. Google is supposedly going to make shifts away from listing the classic “ten blue links,” the listings of websites in its search results and instead will provide a more “visual, snackable, personal, and human” layout and interface designed to appeal more to younger searchers.
Converse with search. Google will also have a place its search results to allow you to have conversations with its search engine. Will it be an embed of Google Bard? Will it be named Magi? It is unclear but we should know on Wednesday when Sundar Pichai of Google will take the stage to provide the keynote.
Project Magi. As we reported earlier, Google is working on an all-new search engine, a team of more than 160 Googlers are working full-time on adding new features to the existing Google Search. This project is being code-named Magi, according to these reports and may be released as early as next month to a subset of users. According to the report, Magi would allow searchers to complete transactions, such as buying shoes or booking flights. This would allow searchers to complete financial transactions, all while still incorporating the existing – and lucrative – Google search ads. These changes can allow searchers to answer questions about “software coding and write code based on a user’s request.” “Google may place an ad under the computer code answers, according to a document,” the report added.
These reports came earlier from New York Times which reported, “the new search engine would offer users a far more personalized experience than the company’s current service, attempting to anticipate users’ needs.” The new Google search engine is still in its early stages, with no timeline for its release. But this new effort ” demonstrates Google’s ambitions to reimagine the search experience.”
The Wall Street Journal says we should see some of this demonstrated at the Google I/O event.
What may be announced. “Google plans to place greater emphasis on responding to queries that traditional web results can’t easily answer,” the Wall Street Journal wrote. Searchers might be asked to follow-up questions or swipe through visuals such as TikTok videos in response to their queries. We have seen this already with short videos that Google has been testing since 2020 and launched shortly after.
Google may also show online forum posts, maybe based on Q&A structured data, to make it easier for people to consume content in bit-sized chunks.
The shift will present Google “with the need to refine our definition of ‘trusted’ content, especially when there is no single right answer,” according to the documents outlining the company’s search strategy. Google will “give attribution and literacy tools to enable confidence in making use of the content,” according to the documents, the WSJ added.
Glenn Gabe noted on Twitter the focus on “younger users” with these changes.
Why we care. Changes to Google Search can be significant regarding the traffic site owners, publishers, content creators, and others get to their websites. Google sends a considerable amount of traffic to the web. If Google steps away from the traditional ten blue links, which it has been doing slowly over the years, that traffic might change.
Google I/O is just a few days away, so hang tight and wait to hear what Google has planned directly from the bot’s mouth. We will have much to report on in the coming days, so stay tuned.
