Google adjusts its search engine –

NEW YORK (EFE).—At 26 years old, the search engine Google It is fighting to avoid becoming a dinosaur and is using the same tools that threaten it, chatbots with artificial intelligence (AI) and short social media formats, to try to ensure that its search engine remains relevant and has an audience.

Although searching for information on Google has become a verb in many languages ​​— ‘googlear’ in Spanish — much younger platforms such as ChatGPT or TikTok are increasingly overshadowing the tech giant.

Search in networks

Two in five Americans use TikTok as a search engine and nearly one in ten Gen Zers (born between 1997 and 2006) are more likely to trust TikTok than Google, according to an Adobe survey.

Google has acknowledged that it has “seen the wolf’s ears.”

“About 40% of young people, when they are looking for a place to have lunch, don’t open Google Maps or go to Google search. They go to TikTok or Instagram,” Prabhakar Raghavan, a senior vice president at Google, said at a technology conference last July.

Generation Z uses Google 25% less often than Generation X (born between 1965 and 1980) when searching, according to a survey by Forbes and OnePoll.

Social networks have an algorithm tailored to the user, they offer information told in the first person and in the comments section users can discuss the information.

“What we’ve seen with our younger users is that they often value lived experiences and human perspective… That’s why we’ve been investing in search with features like discussion forums or shorter video content,” said Elizabeth Reid, vice president and head of search at Google.

Since 2019, Google has offered TikTok videos as search results and in 2020 it launched its version of TikTok, YouTube Shorts, a platform that allows users to share vertical videos of less than a minute in length, and began including these in its search results.

For Google, generative artificial intelligence (AI) offers the perfect excuse to modernize, but also the possibility for users to skip the step of entering their questions into a search engine and ask them directly to a chatbot.

This month, both Google and OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, introduced a human-like AI assistant that allows it to see, hear, reason and help the user; Amazon followed suit with its new version of Alexa.

Google announced this month that it will “soon” integrate the ability to ask questions in its search engine with videos to get help from AI, thanks to a new Gemini model (the tech giant’s AI) customized for Google Search.

“We really think of video as an important input and output that we find on Google,” Reid explains.

Another change to the search engine, currently only for users in the United States, is “AI Overviews,” which gives users a general summary of a topic.

For the time being, Reid said, the company is not considering including advertising links in AI responses.

Maintaining trust

In its more than two decades, Google has managed to gain the trust of users – who search for everything from medical topics to information about an athlete or more complex questions such as: How to be happy? or How to be a millionaire? – as well as becoming synonymous with the answer.

However, one of the greatest dangers of AI is hallucinations – well-structured but completely incorrect responses.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in an impromptu press conference at the annual Google I/O developer conference that hallucinations are a “big problem” but are “waning.”