Gemini is coming to Google Search. At its Google I/O keynote on Tuesday, the company showed off new search capabilities powered by its AI assistant. You’ll soon start seeing AI overviews in response to your Google searches instead of the usual search results page.
Google Search is also gaining the ability to analyze videos to answer questions based on them.
Watch this: Google Brings Multistep Reasoning to Search
AI overviews instead of search results
Google is using AI-powered search to introduce multistep reasoning in an attempt to answer more complex questions. An example given during the keynote of a multipart question was asking Google Search to find the best yoga or pilates studios in Boston, show you details on their intro offers and calculate the walking time from Beacon Hill. Gemini can work on each part of this question at once and give an answer within seconds with information that you can then refine.
You’ll end up chatting with Gemini to find the right studio, instead of the old way of searching, where you would break this complex question into its components and search for each one individually. Notably, Google’s AI overviews will keep you on Google’s search page instead of quickly linking you out to third-party websites from its search results page.
More from Google I/O 2024
Gemini will also make Google Search better at planning, Google said. It gave an example about meal planning where Google Search lets you specify your tastes and preferences to receive a meal plan with recipes and a shopping list. And if one part of the plan isn’t right, you can just ask Google Search to tweak it until it is something you want to make and eat.
Gemini will create the plan for you instead of you needing to do the legwork to search for each recipe and then putting the plan together yourself.
Video search
In addition to the textbox in Google Search, you’ll soon be able to use video to ask a question. Gemini’s multimodal understanding lets it analyze a live video and provide answers to a question about it. Examples given to this new video search were how to fix a broken arm on a record player or stuck lever on a camera. Both are instances where you want to fix something but might not know the make or model of the record player or camera, or the specific name of the part that isn’t working.
Gemini-powered search has been a feature in Labs for a while and will start rolling out to users in the US starting today and over the next few weeks. It will expand to other countries soon.
Editor’s note: CNET is using an AI engine to help create a handful of stories. Reviews of AI products like this, just like CNET’s other hands-on reviews, are written by our human team of in-house experts. For more, see CNET’s AI policy and how we test AI.
https://www.cnet.com/rss/all/
Matt Elliott
