Gagan Ghotra

On 11th December Google’s Head of Search Elizabeth Reid was interviewed by Jeremy Kahn at Fortune’s Brainstorm AI 2024 event. The video of recording can be found on Fortune’s website.

Its around 13 minutes long interview discussing Google Search, SEO, quality of information in Google’s Search results, AI Overviews, concerns of publishers loosing clicks because of AI Overviews, how does AI Overviews do personalisation of answers, future of Google Search and couple of other things.

Below I have put together what Elizabeth Reid said for some specific points that I found interesting while listening this interview.

What Elizabeth said about young users preferring chatbots over Google Search?

Here is what Elizabeth said

I think what we’re really focused on the search is the user and really helping that user find information.

The truth is that there are not just billions of questions that people come to Google for.
There’s billions of questions, people don’t even ask and they don’t ask because it’s too hard and that’s because they’re not confident, they can get that answer.

And so we really think about in search, how do we make it so that you can really ask anything you’re curious about and that it really feels effortless and it’s so easy to do that.

You don’t think twice before you do that and we think there’s a huge opportunity ahead of us.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) degrading the quality of information that’s available on the interent and rise of AI content on the open web

Here’s what Elizabeth said

So ensuring that we surface, high quality information is definitely paramount and it’s a huge reason that people have trusted search.

This challenge has existed since the beginning of surge, right? People have constantly created amazing content for the web and they created poor quality content in many ways. It’s a cat and mouse game with those who wish to create spam across.

I would say, AI generated content isn’t itself intrinsically bad, right.

You can use AI to really help people write and create and produce amazing information. But there’s also this challenge of scaled content abuse and this is something we take very seriously. It’s something we’ve continued to work on for many years and that’s the level of spam in search is very low and we’ll stay focused on it because it’s absolutely paramount.

Concern about AI Overviews rollout and site owners loosing clicks from Google Search

Yeah, so I think we have a long history in search and having a value exchange with the ecosystem and we spent billions of clicks for a long time.

But one of the things that there’s sort of this common misconception is that people either want answers or they want links, that’s not actually what we find from research.

People want to get started, but they actually really want to hear from other people. They’re interested in their perspectives, their interests and their understanding of the space.

And so we really tried to build AI Overviews and continue to iterate them in a way that enables people to get started, but then continue to connect to the web and we see that that’s one of the things people love about AI
Overviews is this ability to have that hybrid to understand and then, to continue on in your journey and I think that’s only gonna continue.

We see that people, especially younger users really want to hear from the authentic voices. They want to hear from the people they trust, and that’s part of what makes search special connecting to the web.

And so that’s at the heart of how we think about the AI transformation still enabling that mission of connecting people to the best of web. How AI can actually even make that better in allowing people to connect to truly the best of web.

We do see people click, both within the AI overviews as well as on the rest of the page.

And in fact, when we see AI Overviews, we see that the clicks that go out to the web are of higher quality.

People spend more time on the sites that go because these are really giving the information that they want.

Is AI Overviews learning from a user or its learning from everyone who is using it

Here’s what Elizabeth said

There’s sort of what is the level of contextualization that we think about in spaces and there’s some understanding of like, how do we interpret the query that can be more contextual but in general that’s what we use throughout search not just broadly and we try and learn from information, very privacy safe way, giving people controls but we can learn a lot.

This is how people learn. These are the best sites to go to. Right? Is often based on user feedback in addition to our high quality signals. So we try to do it in a way that’s very clear that gives people agency. But that we can actually improve based on usage of the product.

Will we ever see a domain specific Google Search?

Here’s what Elizabeth said

I think we’ve continued to look at different domains in different ways. I mean, if you come to search today. We have a mode that enables you to images, right? If you really wanna go deep in images, we have ability to go deeper on shopping or on local or another.

And I think that will continue, there will be cases where what people want is specialised understanding of information, I also think with AI the ability to just personalised the responses evolves in ways that we traditionally don’t think.

A lot of people previously with personalisation with ranking. Think of it as like, okay, I’m going to re-rank the just the sites, okay? But actually, there’s a lot of different ways in which personalisation can be useful, okay?

It starts with Basics, like some people love video results and some people really do not, okay?

Can you understand that?

What’s the level of understanding of what you want, a response, are you an expert in that domain and we should assume so, or are you, you know, sort of trying to help your five-year-old with a concept that you don’t actually know very much and explain it to her?

And how can you do that? Are you on the middle of a long journey or on a shorter Journey? Do you like to scan information quickly? Are you an audio learner? And then we should make it easier to understand information in that form.

And so I think besides getting better within domains, there’s just a huge opportunity to start to understand.

Like what does it really mean to make information effortless? If you go back to the mission.

Most people like if they repeat the Google Mission kind of start stop halfway through and they go organise the world’s information and that’s kind of where they stop but there’s this part at the end about universally accessible and useful. Like if we show you information it’s organised but is not useful to you.

It’s not really that useful, right overall. Um and so I think there’s an opportunity with AI to rethink.
What it means to give information in a way that’s truly useful to you that truly feels effortless to consume and interact with.

Using AI Overviews for internal search on your own site or searching through business documents?

Here’s what Elizabeth said

There’s a bunch of different offerings that Google cloud ha and I will confess that I’m not the expert in Google Cloud.

So you may want to get additional information on this but at a high level we both have services that allow you to have your own data.

There’s also a surface that allows grounding with search so that you can get the best of sort of searches understanding what’s high quality information, your product.

And so Cloud offers a variety of different surfaces so that we can actually take some of the key underlying LLMs and understanding about how to get high quality information and make it available for others, right.

Is Gemini and all these other Google AI surfaces will be recombined into Google Search being the ONLY surface that users can access information through

I think about this a lot is, how do you meet users where they are? And so, if they come to search, can we give them the information from they want?

If they choose to use Gemini? Can they do that? If you actually go back and like long enough ago, people ask this question about YouTube and Google’s video search.

They asked this question about Google Maps and local search on search like wait, where should I search for a restaurant on search or map?

Should we just merge search and maps together? Really what you want to do to? is make it easiest like whatever for the user to come forth.

The other thing that I would add in that space is that I think you’ve mentioned the keyword box. Okay, actually search is evolving since the keyboard box is only a component, right?

We introduced voice, we introduced Lens, hopefully, all of you know what lens is. If not, you should come find me afterwards, that ability to search for what you see.

And I think the space of of information is going much more multi-modality in its input. And the reason is because, you know, we’re humans that existed a long, long time before technology, and the way that we understand the world, and we think about the world is based on a lot of different senses, right?

It’s what we see and what we hear and how we talk across. And if you wanna make information effortless, we’re gonna continue and search to think about what is the most natural way you would express if you had no constraints.

If you assume tech was not a barrier, and you just asked your friend, as easy as possible.

How can you have that experience with search? So the tech really comes to you, instead of you having to translate your need to the tech.

Comment about on going DOJ question

Here’s what Elizabeth said

So I don’t have more really that I can comment in regards to this.

What I will say about search is that we have consistently found that users choose search because they really find it the most helpful. And I think we’re going to continue to really focus from from my point of view and how do we help users?

Comment on Google Search user being an AI agent and not a human?

Here’s what Elizabeth said

Our goal at the end of the day is to help the user. As people interface or as agents, interface with search in different ways.

I think we will always try and evolve into the question about like, okay, how do you help the agent? such that the agent helps the user, but at the end of the day, we’re really focused on helping people, and we’re continue to innovate in that space, right?

What are we going to see from Google Search going forward?

Here’s what Elizabeth said

I think you will definitely see more multi-modality. I think in general you will continue to see this evolution such that, it feels like accessing information, feels just much easier.

It feels more effortless.

It feels like the question that you actually have in your mind is the question you get to ask, you don’t have to break it down, you don’t have to translate it, you don’t have to worry about what language you speak.

You don’t have to worry about how you learn best and that search just becomes much more accessible in new and exciting way.