Dive Brief:
- Google is launching a slate of AI-powered updates to its web and app search tools this week, adding new ways to search and view results, the company announced Thursday.
- The app’s Lens feature, which lets customers take photos of items and then search for similar products, was updated to surface additional information including reviews and price info. Users can also now use Lens to search with videos as well by asking a question about the footage.
- Basic web search is also receiving an AI upgrade. Users who search for recipes or meal inspiration on a mobile device are now served a personalized spread of results organized into categories by AI.
Dive Insight:
Google’s search UX improvements could raise the bar for all search experiences, whether on the web or in a company’s app.
The combination of AI-organized search results and voice-activated search capabilities could shift expectations for search engine speed and ease-of-use in particular.
Google’s newest features improve the search experience by reducing the number of clicks required to retrieve information, according to Nikhil Lai, senior analyst at Forrester. This supplements Google’s other AI-powered improvements to create search results pages that offer more compelling experiences.
Google isn’t the only company enhancing search with AI, but its credibility and pervasiveness means it conditions users’ behavior more than any other search engine. Nearly two-thirds of consumers say they would rely on Google to verify suspect responses provided by ChatGPT, according to research cited by Lai.
“Google’s strength as a crawler and repository of reliable information on the internet is unparalleled,” Lai told CX Dive in an email.
Other companies can look at Google to learn how to improve their own search UX, and some are already experimenting with their own capabilities. For example, Walmart is using generative AI to improve personalization and convenience, while a large Chinese e-commerce platform saw success with a picture-text refinement search tool.
