Making search smarter: How AI is changing the way we find information

It's always a challenge to pick just one thing that stands out from a colossal event like Google Cloud Next. But one trend that really resonated with me, and with many of the clients I spoke with, was the investment in assistive search. We're bringing together even greater context windows with the power of Gemini 2.5, which means we can get even better results for you. We’re even bringing search to Google Agentspace, which gives employees access to Agentspace’s unified enterprise search, analysis, and synthesis capabilities, directly from the search box in Chrome. This is exciting because it brings the ease of search to agents, one of the most valuable enterprise applications of AI we’re seeing today.

But ultimately, this is what I find most humbling: For years, the Google search box has been a familiar, almost deceptively simple gateway to the world's information. That's part of its usability and its magic. But today, AI is helping us talk to search in a very natural way – using long sentences with lots of descriptive words that really help us refine that search and find what we're looking for. It’s also multimodal. This means we can search by talking to Google or by uploading an image, helping us bring more context to the search and, therefore, get better quality search results.

As search evolves, businesses across industries are reimagining how their users access and interact with information. Let’s dig deeper into this trend, and how businesses can use assistive search.

Talking to search like a person

One of the great things about AI-powered search is how we can now interact with our search bar in a far more humanistic way. If you think back, we've all used keyword search or a small number of parameters. You might have typed, "jacket for London in May." But today, I can search using a far more linguistically rich sentence that brings real context to my search query. For example, I could say, "I'd like a jacket in London that is suitable for the months between April and May. That's going to keep me warm in the evening." That's how we actually search for things when we talk to another person.

To me, intent is the most important parameter in any search query. It's usually the most contextually rich element, or the one most emotionally connected to the answer someone's looking for. At Google, we've been utilizing technology to help us understand intent for 25 years. It’s about getting to the heart of what someone truly needs – but how does it work?

The building blocks: what makes AI search work

When I think about the components of AI-powered search, three things come to mind. The first one is natural language. This is simply the ability to talk and ask a query in the same way that we converse with one another – using rich, deep, contextually filled questions. It’s about moving away from stilted keywords to a more fluid, human way of asking for information.

The second thing is around now being able to include alternative mediums. I’m talking about audio and video, which can further enrich that search. Perhaps these mediums can bring to life an area of the world that we've seen, or a particular product that we want to engage with. Imagine being able to use a short video clip or a sound as part of your search query – it opens up new ways to find what you're looking for when words alone might not be enough.

And finally, AI overviews. This is the ability to summarize multiple pieces of information and make it digestible for us. The system can bring the best content it can find from various sources and synthesize it to answer that question as simply as possible. It’s not just about finding links; it’s about getting direct answers and summaries that save time and effort, making complex information much easier to grasp.

And these capabilities, unsurprisingly, have incredible benefits for enterprise.

Gaining an edge: how businesses can use smarter search

AI across business is going to become ubiquitous. The ability for organizations to retain the talent they need, to service their clients to the best of their ability, or to drive the maximum amounts of internal efficiency – these things are going to be defined and designed by the level of AI adoption across certain areas.

For example, one of the prime areas that we see AI-powered search is across the retail sector. We’re helping organizations understand the context and intent of every query, which makes it easy to add in pictures or videos about the products customers search for. If you combine that with AI recommendations to present the best quality search results, it drives conversion rates.

Interestingly, a number of organizations feel that they have to have their data environment in perfect shape in order to adopt AI, and actually, quite the contrary is true. We're seeing lots of organizations take a huge step forward in both progress and efficiency by jumping in, giving them extra headroom to go and tackle some of the bigger data challenges that they might have.

Looking ahead

Given how fast the industry is moving, I think it's going to be a bit difficult to predict the future with absolute certainty, but we've certainly got some indications on where it's going. The capabilities of large language models, their context windows, continue to get richer and richer. Because of this, we're going to see bigger and bigger questions being asked of search. Think about combining audio, video, sound, and thousands of documents just to find the right piece of information. The focus will always be on getting the right context and, crucially, understanding the intent to find the right information for the right question as easily as possible.

To learn more, download our AI Trends report.