Google’s future is Google googling

Google I/O was, as predicted, an AI show. But now that the keynote is over, we can see that the company’s vision is to use AI to eventually do a lot of Googling for you.

A lot of that vision rests on AI Mode in Google Search, which Google is starting to roll out to everyone in the US. AI Mode offers a more chatbot-like interface right inside Search, and behind the scenes, Google is doing a lot of work to pull in information instead of making you scroll through a list of blue links.

Onstage, Google presented an example of someone asking for things to do in Nashville over a weekend with friends who like food, music, and “exploring off the beaten path.” AI Mode hopped into action, creating Google-curated lists of “restaurants good for foodies,” recommending places with a “chill bar atmosphere with live music,” highlighting “places off-the-beaten path,” and suggesting websites featuring good things to do in Nashville. It even created a custom map recommending places to go. (If you’re doing some shopping, AI Mode can show you a personalized batch of listings, too.)

This is essentially Google doing your planning work for you. The service generated a whole bunch of related search queries , then synthesized all the results. Normally, you’d do all those searches separately. Now, Google does them for you.

A lot of what powers AI Mode is what Liz Reid, who leads Google’s Search team, called Google’s “query fanout technique.” Here’s how Reid described it:

Now, under the hood, Search recognizes when a question needs advanced reasoning. It calls on our custom version of Gemini to break the question into different subtopics, and it issues a multitude of queries simultaneously on your behalf. It searches across the entire web, going way deeper than a traditional search. And it taps into all of our datasets of real-time information, like the Knowledge Graph, Shopping Graph, and in this case, local data, including insights from our Maps community of over 500 million contributors. Search pulls together a response and checks its work to make sure it meets our high bar for information quality. If it detects any gaps, it issues even more searches to fill them in. That means with AI Mode, you get all this from just a single search, and you get it fast.

TL;DR: it’s a lot of Googling. The AI Mode interface even shows the number of searches it’s running for you. This summer, Google plans to add a “Deep Search” feature to AI Mode that can do even more; Reid said that it relies on the query fanout technique “but multiplied” and that it can “issue dozens or even hundreds of searches on your behalf.”

Google wants to do more Googling for you in other places, too — thanks in large part to Project Mariner, Google’s tool that you can specifically instruct to do tasks on the web for you. It can now manage up to 10 simultaneous tasks. The new Teach and Repeat feature lets you teach Project Mariner how to do a task so it can repeat it in the future.

Agent Mode in the Gemini app — also new — will be able to similarly go and do a task on your behalf, powered in part by Project Mariner. CEO Sundar Pichai showed an example of how it could help you find an apartment in Austin in part by checking Zillow listings.

And Project Mariner is coming to AI Mode this summer as well. At I/O, Rajan Patel, the VP of engineering for Search, showed how AI Mode will be able to find tickets to a baseball game and even show you a button to buy them right from Search.

Reid said that Google believes AI will be “the most powerful engine for discovery that the web has ever seen.” But if Google’s AI tools turn out to be as powerful in practice as they appear in the demos, all of that discovery might just be Google doing the work for you.