What AI Means to Google Search

Nick Fox, Google's SVP of Knowledge & Information on what AI means to Google Search: 

AI is the best thing that's ever happened to search. And, you know, a lot of people are questioning that. A lot of people are saying, hey, what does AI mean for search? And what we see, you know, the vision of search is you should be able to ask whatever question is on your mind. For us, it doesn't have to be about time, and to some extent, attention, but we don't measure search by how many minutes are people spending on search. We measure search by how many queries are people doing, how many tasks are people doing, actually. 

If it takes two queries to do a task instead of five queries to do a task, we would prefer that. We actually don't want people to do more queries in a way where they're, you know, if they're doing more queries because they're thrashing and they're not getting a good experience, or they're spending more time because they're thrashing and not getting a good experience, that's not what we optimize for. 

We actually try to get people off Google as quickly as we can. It's kind of, you know, one of the things that I think has been a hallmark of Google. We do want people to be doing more things with Google. If we can help people with, you know, twice as many of their questions as we could, you know, before, that's great. 

But it should be they're doing more with Google because they're getting more done, rather than they're spending more time to get the same set of things done.

I think there's a big misconception that AI is Google Search's worst enemy, but I'm my opinion it's made search better in the event of serving information. If I want to browse the web, there's always the "Web" tab that I tend to use.