We have entered the new “Gemini era” of Google, and the Search Generative Experience and artificial intelligence will continue to be a big part of Search, according to Google’s parent company Alphabet’s latest earnings call.
Why we care Despite what you’ve heard on social media, SGE is not going away. While it’s still unclear whether Google will fully roll out SGE as the default experience in 2024, Google continues to test and tweak it. CEO Sundar Pichai said he feels “very good” about SGE’s progress.
What we learned Let’s look at the most interesting quotes from Alphabet’s Q4 earnings call around SGE, Gemini, Ads and AI Search.
SGE. We’re in the “early days” of SGE, Pichai said, which should be the clearest indication that SGE isn’t going away anytime soon. Also, SGE was one of the first things Pichai discussed.
Pichai also said that SGE is showing more links to SGE, which has been a huge and ongoing concern for publishers worried about losing valuable organic traffic. But if those links generate traffic? We have no idea because Google hasn’t shared any data.
Here’s what Pichai had to say:
“We’re already experimenting with Gemini in search, where it makes our search generative experience, or SGE, faster for users. We’ve seen a 40% reduction in latency in English in the US I’m happy with what we’re seeing in the early days of SGE.” “It’s available through Search Labs in seven languages. By applying generative AI to search, we can serve a wider range of information needs and answer new types of questions, including those that benefit from multiple perspectives. People find it especially useful for more complex questions like comparisons or longer queries. It’s also useful in areas where people are looking for a deeper understanding, like education or even gift ideas.” . “We’re improving satisfaction, including responses for more conversational and complex queries. As I mentioned before, we’re surfacing more links to SGE and linking to a wider range of sources on the results pageand we’ll continue to prioritize approaches that bring value to our users and drive valuable traffic to publishers.”
Later in the call, Pichai said he felt “very good about the progress” of SGE, as well as AI Search in general:
“When we test the generative search experience, especially with everything that’s out there. And we can see the progress we’re making and how users like the experience better. And so I think I feel great about the progress. And our roadmap for ’24 is strong in both search and underlying AI progress, including modeling. So I’m really excited about what’s in store for us on the 24th.”
Twins. Gemini 1.0, released in December, ushered in Google’s new “Gemini era,” Pichai said. Gemini Ultra “coming soon”. Google previously said that the Ultra model will be used for very complex tasks. It will be a payment model.
Pichai quotes:
“We closed the year by launching the age of the twins, a new series of industry-leading models that will power the next generation of advancements. Gemini is the first realization of the vision we had when we formed Google DeepMind, bringing together our two world-class research teams. It is designed to understand and combine text, images, audio, video and code in a native multimodal way and it can work with everything from mobile devices to data centers.” “Gemini gives us a great foundation. It’s already demonstrating state-of-the-art capabilities, and it’s only going to get better. Gemini Ultra is coming soon. The team is already working on the next versions and bringing it to our products.”
SGE and Announcements. Google continues to experiment with native SGE ads, but also indicated that ads above or below SGE were also successful. Here’s what Philipp Schindler, Google’s senior vice president and chief commercial officer, said:
“As we shared last quarter, ads will continue to play an important role in the new search experience and will continue to experiment new formats specific to SGE. SGE is creating new opportunities for us to improve people’s shopping journeys by showing relevant ads alongside search results. We found that too people find ads above or below the AI-based overview useful as they provide useful options for people to take action and connect with businesses.” “Launches included a one-stop-shop deals destination; new filters, how to get it fast; and AI-generated gift recommendations in SGE.”
Dig deeper. Google search revenue rises to $48 billion, total ad revenue up 11%
Search AI. Google’s future vision for search seems to go beyond providing answers, where Google acts more as an “agent.” It appears to be a 10+ year goal, and search will be radically different from what we’ve known for more than two decades.
Google has previously said that it wants to make Google more “surroundingly” available (essentially, search is everything, everywhere, all at once). Here’s Pichai’s quote:
“Clearly, as I said, as we’re bringing SGE into the product, the early feedback is positive.” “And we’ve been iterating on it, and it clearly works very well for certain types of queries. We’re expanding the set of queries where it works very well. It certainly answers a certain category of queries for the first time in a better way. So that also gives us the direction to continue.” In general, one of the things that I think people underestimate about search is the breadth of search, the amount of queries that we see consistently in a new day, that we haven’t seen before. So the trick here is to deliver that high-quality experience in everything we see in Search. And over time, we think Assistant will be very complementary. And we’ll be using generative AI there again, especially with our more advanced models and Bard, and it allows us to act more like an agent over timeif I had to think about it the future and perhaps go beyond responses and follow users even further. So this is the — directionally, the opportunity set. Obviously, a lot of execution ahead. But it’s an area where I think we have a deep sense of what we need to do. And all the work we’ve done so far, the feedback has been super positive.
Pichai also talked about Circle to Search, Lens and Bard:
Beyond SGE, we continue to use AI to make search more accessible and intuitive. Circle to Search lets you search what you see on Android phones with a simple gesture without switching apps. It will be available starting this week on the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro and the new Samsung Galaxy S24 series. And now Lens offers generative AI overviews. You can add text to a visual search to ask questions about anything you see and get AI-based insights on the fly. In addition to Search, we’re also seeing strong interest in our AI-based solutions for advertisers, including our new conversational experience that uses Gemini to accelerate search campaign creation. Then there’s Bard, our conversational AI tool that complements search. It is now powered by Gemini Pro and is much more capable at things like understanding, summarizing, reasoning, coding and planning. It is now in over 40 languages and over 230 countries worldwide. Going forward, we will release an even more advanced version for subscribers powered by Gemini Ultra.
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