Google devising radical search changes to beat back AI rivals

Google’s employees were shocked when they learned in March that South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung was considering replacing Google with Microsoft’s Bing as the default search engine on its devices.

For years, Bing had been a search engine also-ran. But it became a lot more interesting to industry insiders when it recently added new artificial intelligence technology.

Google’s reaction to the Samsung threat was “panic,” according to internal messages reviewed by The New York Times. An estimated $3 billion in annual revenue was at stake with the Samsung contract. An additional $20 billion is tied to a similar Apple contract that will be up for renewal this year.

AI competitors such as the new Bing are quickly becoming the most serious threat to Google’s search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is racing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology. It is also upgrading the existing one with AI features, according to internal documents reviewed by The New York Times.

The new features are being created by designers, engineers and executives working in so-called sprint rooms to tweak and test the latest versions. The new search engine would offer users a far more personalized experience than the company’s current service, attempting to anticipate users’ needs.

Billions of people use Google’s search engine every day for everything from finding restaurants and directions to understanding a medical diagnosis, and that simple white page with the company logo and an empty bar in the middle is one of the most widely used webpages in the world. Changes to it would have a significant impact on the lives of ordinary people, and until recently, it was hard to imagine anything challenging it.

Google has been worried about AI-powered competitors since OpenAI, a San Francisco startup that is working with Microsoft, demonstrated a chatbot called ChatGPT in November. About two weeks later, Google created a task force in its search division to start building AI products, said two people with knowledge of the efforts, who were not authorized to discuss them publicly.

Modernizing its search engine has become an obsession at Google, and the planned changes could put new AI technology in phones and homes all over the world.

The Samsung threat represented the first potential crack in Google’s seemingly impregnable search business, which was worth $162 billion last year.