The final judgement for Google vs DOJ case was put out recently and in that document there were many things which might be of interest for SEOs and marketers. But what caught my eye is mention of FastSearch and of course there is lot more which was put out.
To ground its Gemini models, Google uses a proprietary technology called FastSearch. FastSearch is based on RankEmbed signals — a set of search ranking signals-and generates abbreviated, ranked web results that a model can use to produce a grounded response. FastSearch delivers results more quickly than Search because it retrieves fewer documents, but the resulting quality is lower than Search’s fully ranked web results.
Google does not make FastSearch directly available to third parties through an API. Rather, the technology is integrated into a Google Cloud offering called Vertex AI, which is available to third parties to ground on Google Search results or other data sources. Vertex customers do not, however, receive the FastSearch-ranked web results themselves, only the information from those results. Google limits Vertex in this manner to protect its intellectual property.
Its clearly mentioned in the document that Google is making a technical choice – making it faster while at the same time compromising some quality.
Even though the documents released mention this in context of Gemini only which is available in Gemini App and at gemini.google.com but I guess if same tech stack FastSearch is being used by Google’s AI Mode/Overviews it might explain few things which have gone terribly wrong & AI Overviews saying totally wrong information like add glue on a pizza & eating rocks but this was last year & Google also said they have done somethings to improve this.
In 2025 both AI Overviews/Mode have improved a lot but its still interesting to know that there might be something in Google’s technical stack where they are compromising quality for speed which hasn’t been the case for usual search results & Google for years been pushing that their goal is to serve higher quality information (content created by people for people).
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