Google search is over, you know

The era of the “Blue Ten Links” has officially ended.

At Google I/O on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered search overhaul centered around a reimagined “smart search box” — what the company describes as the biggest change to the entry point to the web since the search box debuted more than 25 years ago.

Instead of displaying a simple list of links, Google Search will sometimes immerse users in interactive, AI-powered experiences. Google also offers tools that can send “information agents” to collect information on a user’s behalf, along with tools that allow users to create custom widgets that suit their needs.

The resulting experience will no longer look much like people’s perception of Google Search, which has long been defined by ranked links to websites that contain the information you need.

With a revamped search experience, the new search box simply expands to accommodate longer, more conversational queries, rather than making you decide what type of search experience or mode you want to choose at the beginning of the query. Google says it will also feature a new AI-powered query suggestion system that goes beyond autocomplete to help people formulate more complex and precise queries.

The company noted that Google’s AI Overviews feature will also allow users to ask follow-up questions in AI mode, starting Tuesday.

Google is also introducing agent capabilities and AI-powered interactive features into the search experience. This means people will spend less time clicking on the traditional blue links that Google search uses to display them.

Starting this summer, people will be able to create, customize, and manage several new “information agents” within Google Search. These agents can work in the background 24/7 to track changes on the web and alert you to new information. For example, you could have an agent that tracks market movements based on client parameters, as Google suggests.

While the underlying technology here is powered by artificial intelligence, making it more capable, the idea itself is not new.

In 2003, Google launched Google Alertsa change detection service that emails users when new web results match their search terms. The Web was smaller and more manageable at the time, of course, so this became part of many information workers’ toolkits. (That service still exists Somehow, but it’s no longer the way most web users get new information.)

Information collection agents are an evolution of Google Alerts. Apart from detecting changes, they can also understand them.

“You can send an alert to track market movements in a specific sector using very specific parameters, and the agent will create a monitoring plan for you, including the tools and data it needs to access — like our real-time financial data,” Liz Read, Google’s head of search, explained in a press conference. “It will then track those changes and notify you when conditions are met, providing a composite update with links and information you can dig deeper into,” she added.

This shift means that “web searching” will increasingly be done by AI agents rather than humans. Instead, people will focus more on acting on the information provided by these agents rather than manually clicking on links.

Links will become an afterthought with the upcoming changes to the search results experience, which build on Google’s previous launch of AI search features, such as short summaries known as AI Overviews and conversational search, AI Mode.

AI Overviews is now used by over 2.5 billion users monthly; Meanwhile, Conversational Search Mode, which launched last year, now exceeds 1 billion monthly users. (ChatGPT, for comparison, has 900 million weekly active usersas of earlier this year. This suggests that ChatGPT is now seeing more frequent engagement, with users returning repeatedly over the course of a week, while Google has a higher number of unique people touching its AI features over the course of a month.)

Now, thanks to the combination of Gemini and… Google anti gravitythe company’s agent development platform, search results will begin to appear like interactive web pages.

“From dynamic layouts and interactive visuals to persistent, stateful project spaces you can return to again and again,” says Reed. One way Google is using these new capabilities is by using “generative UI” (user interface), where it quickly creates custom widgets and visuals to answer users’ search questions.

You can imagine, for example, how a question about black holes in space could trigger an interactive image that brings the concept to life, Reed said, adding that users could then ask follow-up questions and see Google respond with entirely new visuals in real time.

Google says the new system was designed in partnership with the Google DeepMind team and uses Gemini Flash 3.5. It will be released to everyone who uses Google for free this summer.

Additionally, Google will allow users to leverage Antigravity to build their own customizable experiences — such as “widgets” — directly in search using natural language commands. Again, it’s not so much about information retrieval as it is about action. For example, you could create a meal planning app using information from your calendar to help you decide what to make and when to eat it, or a fitness app created to meet your specific goals.

Combined, these changes will likely increase Google referrals to publishers, who were already experiencing declining referrals due to AI Overviews. This has brought some advertising-driven media operations to a standstill, and now things are likely to get worse.

There is little time left for publishers to adapt. The new search box will arrive this week, and the generative UI will arrive this summer. Both are free. Creating widgets and information agents will roll out first to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers this summer.

But Google’s long-term plan is to make its AI technology more widely available, including the Spark personal AI agent, which will eventually be free, as well as many AI features.

“Part of the reason we’re focused on offering flagship models — that are highly capable, but also very efficient and fast and at a lower price — is that we want to bring them to as many people as possible, so I think that’s where we’re going to shine,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a pre-I/O press conference.