NEW DELHI : Google on Thursday announced an India-tuned version of its generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered version of its primary product, Search. The platform, which will be available as a pilot to select users, will offer a chatbot-like experience—instead of the typical search bar that has been synonymous with the search engine so far. The India-specific version of Google’s AI-powered Search, called Search Generative Experience (SGE), will offer users the ability to search in English and Hindi, and also offer both voice readouts of search results, and voice inputs for search queries.
SGE comes to India nearly four months after its global launch. On 10 May, Elizabeth Reid, vice-president and general manager of Search at Google, announced the new version of Search. “With new breakthroughs in generative AI, we’re again reimagining what a search engine can do. With this powerful new technology, we can unlock entirely new types of questions you never thought Search could answer, and transform the way information is organized, to help you sort through and make sense of what’s out there,” Reid wrote.
Speaking at a roundtable in Delhi on Wednesday, Puneesh Kumar, general manager of Search for Google India, said the platform will be available for users who voluntarily opt-in to try the service.
“We will eventually seek to expand the platform and our pilot, and sign-ups for it will be offered to users to opt-in to our Google Labs programme. Our overall privacy and user data policies will continue to remain constant with what they presently are for our Search platform, and this will not need a change in terms of the overall personal data usage and collection policy,” Kumar said.
To be sure, Google continues to remain the market leader in search engines globally. Data accessed on analytics platform Similarweb on Wednesday by Mint pegged Bing to have registered 1.2 billion searches in the 30-day period preceding Tuesday. In comparison, Google registered 85.3 billion searches—leaving Microsoft with just 1.4% share in the field.
Kumar added that SGE will continue to integrate advertisements—a key part of Google’s Search platform and the largest contributor to Google, as well as its parent Alphabet’s overall revenue. On 25 August, Mint reported that ads through the Google Search platform delivers nearly 80% of Alphabet’s overall annual revenue.
Google’s push for offering the new format of generative AI-based chatbot-style conversational search comes as Microsoft took the lead in the latter—rolling out a new version of its own search engine, Bing, powered by OpenAI’s large language model (LLM), GPT-4, on 7 February. The launch left Google, whose research division is credited with inventing transformer models—the core technology behind generative AI—behind in the generative AI race. This has since pushed Google to also launch Performance Max—a generative AI platform for advertisers to create marketing campaigns for its Search platform.
Kumar, however, did not confirm if generative AI-powered ads will come as a feature within the SGE platform that Google launched on 31 August. However, the executive affirmed that Google will eventually expand its pilot project to more Indian languages, without offering a timeline or naming the languages to which the platform will be extended.
Industry experts have pegged Google’s AI search platform as a move to monetize its generative AI efforts.
Jaspreet Bindra, founder of tech consultancy firm Tech Whisperer, told Mint that Google initially delayed deployment of its transformer models in its products “as it posed a direct threat to its own, vast ad business.”
It is this that Google may seek to achieve by running early pilots of its generative AI-powered search platform.
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Updated: 31 Aug 2023, 12:43 AM IST
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