Report: Google making Search more ‘visual, snackable, personal, and human’

Abner Li | May 5 2023 - 11:11 pm PT

AI coming to Google Search is more than a given at this point, and a new report details how the search engine is set for what sounds like a massive overhaul to boost its relevance and match how people are now finding information.

The Wall Street Journal obtained internal documents describing a plan to make Google Search more “visual, snackable, personal, and human.”

One aspect of that will involve adding more “short videos” to Search results in response to how young people are increasingly getting information.

Prabhakar Raghavan, a Google senior vice president overseeing the search engine, said at a conference in July last year that about 40% of young people turn to TikTok or Meta Platforms-owned Instagram when searching for restaurants, citing an internal study.

Furthering the elevation of user-generated content is another plan to show even more online forum posts in Search, which sounds like the company’s response to people appending “site:reddit.com” to results. Last year, Google added a “Discussions and forums” section:

Meanwhile, Google will indeed add AI chat to Search, and this could be announced at I/O 2023 next week, while other aspects (“visual, snackable, personal, and human”) of the Search overhaul should come later this year, which is what the New York Times reported in mid-April. Google’s “Search On” event covering the engine, Maps, and Lens is hosted is usually hosted in September.

Search will more frequently surface follow-up questions for users that help expand their original query.

Throughout this effort, the WSJ says that “Google executives have stressed that search products using conversational AI features should not upset website owners, in part by including source links.”

Overall, the company is particularly interested in helping users when there are “no right answers.”

The shift will present Google “with the need to refine our definition of ‘trusted’ content, especially when there is no single right answer,” according to the documents outlining the company’s search strategy. Google will “give attribution and literacy tools to enable confidence in making use of the content,” according to the documents.