Google Search Generative Experience (SGE) was set to expire as a Google Labs experiment at the end of 2023 but its time as an experiment was quietly extended, making it clear that SGE is not coming to search in the near future. Surprisingly, letting Microsoft take the lead may have been the best perhaps unintended approach for Google.
Google’s AI Strategy For Search
Google’s decision to keep SGE as a Google Labs project fits into the broader trend of Google’s history of preferring to integrate AI in the background.
The presence of AI isn’t always apparent but it has been a part of Google Search in the background for longer than most people realize.
The very first use of AI in search was as part of Google’s ranking algorithm, a system known as RankBrain. RankBrain helped the ranking algorithms understand how words in search queries relate to concepts in the real world.
“When we launched RankBrain in 2015, it was the first deep learning system deployed in Search. At the time, it was groundbreaking… RankBrain (as its name suggests) is used to help rank — or decide the best order for — top search results.”
The next implementation was Neural Matching which helped Google’s algorithms understand broader concepts in search queries and webpages.
And one of the most well known AI systems that Google has rolled out is the Multitask Unified Model, also known as Google MUM. MUM is a multimodal AI system that encompasses understanding images and text and is able to place them within the contexts as written in a sentence or a search query.
SpamBrain, Google’s spam fighting AI is quite likely one of the most important implementations of AI as a part of Google’s search algorithm because it helps weed out low quality sites.