Last year, after watching Google’s I/O keynote, I wrote that it felt like the future of Google was Google googling. After watching this year’s I/O keynote on Tuesday, I don’t think Google just wants to google you — I think it wants to do it. everything for you, everything appears in the search box.
Take the trusty Google search bar, something Google is generally reluctant to update, which is getting some updates. It will “expand” as you type longer questions. It will give you “AI-powered suggestions” that Google says will “go beyond autocomplete,” which may or may not cause you to fill in unintended search fields.
Or what about what Google shows in search results? From the AI Overview you can further ask questions with AI Mode, which generates a custom page with an AI-generated summary of what you’re searching for instead of showing you the usual list of links. Search results will be even more personalized because Google will be able to create a custom UI for you, including generating things like interactive visuals and graphs right on your search results page. You’ll also be able to ask Google, right in the search bar, to create “information agents” that can track things you care about – like new sneaker drops or real estate listings – making the search bar a kind of AI-powered Google Alert.
The Gemini gets a bunch of upgrades and features, too. It can send you a “Daily Brief” that tells you about your day based on information from all your Google apps, like Gmail and Google Calendar. You can create your own custom Google-powered agents thanks to a feature called Gemini Spark, which may have a leg up on agents like OpenClaw because it’s a first-party offering from Google. The company also recently made a big fuss about Personal Intelligence, which pulls content from your other Google apps to help inform your responses from Gemini.
In Workspace, Google wants you to just talk about tools like Gmail and Docs and Keep, and apps will help with things like analyzing your inbox, writing a document, or generating a to-do list. When you’re shopping, the new Universal Cart will track items you want to buy from apps like Search, Gemini, Gmail, and YouTube — and let you check out using Google’s payment infrastructure. And speaking of YouTube, the company is testing an AI Mode-like experience where, again, it will put together a search results page instead of just showing you a list of things to watch.
There’s more – with the new Gemini Omni models, you’ll be able to create a video using things like other videos, other images, and audio as instructions. Down the line, you will be able to produce other media as well; the family of models is designed so that you can “create anything.”
I can continue; more was announced at I/O. But what I’m trying to get across here is that Google doesn’t just show you a place of information anymore. With its various search boxes, it now answers questions for you in the way it thinks is most useful. From the point of view of helping the poor: If done well and accurately, all of this he can it was very helpful. But that means it has to be done well and accurately, and that’s a very high bar to clear, especially for complex search queries or queries about sensitive data like my Gmail emails.
It’s not hard to imagine a future where, one day, Google just makes everything happen in one global search box. No more jumping between Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, Gemini – my guess is that the current state of Google is that you just type whatever you want into the Ask Google box, and Google finds a way to make it happen and present it to you in a personalized way.
Assuming that’s the case, that’s not what I want. The fun of the internet is actually doing the work of finding things, even if it’s sometimes frustrating, difficult, or time-consuming. Sure, the voice of talking to Gmail for help getting things in my inbox seems useful, but I’ve also spent years honing my email management system – which works whether I’m using Gmail or not. It works well too meI think we should all make efforts to find systems in all of our digital lives that work best for us instead of relying on Google to find it all in one universal search box.
Google does everything and it means that most of the web that Google relies on falls under it. If Google Search does not send traffic to publishers or websites that need visitors to make money – something that is already happening at a fast pace, thank you Google Zero! — what will Search learn from it, and where will it direct people? If a YouTube feature like AI Mode stops people from browsing videos, how will creators who are losing viewers be able to support themselves to make more videos? Google may not care – it seems they just want a search bar that can do it all, no matter how expensive it is.
