Google says it is making a “fundamental shift” in how it thinks about Google Search. The company hopes the changes will make searches more visual and, in the end, more helpful.
To start, Google is using AI to build AMP stories and surface that content in search results. Google will first focus on creating stories about famous people (movie stars, athletes) that highlight their lifestyles, news, and other facts. Videos will play a bigger role in results. Google wants to surface videos that include the most relevant information about any given query. It will do this by using computer vision to better understand the content of videos before it calculates how they pertain to the search.
Google Images is earning some updates, as well, in order to provide the best possible image results. For example, it will signal how the result ranks in terms of usefulness and freshness. Image search results will more directly take people to the image they seek, rather than a web page that might be hiding the image near the bottom. Image Search will contain more context alongside results, such as captions, the title of the web page, and other guiding factors.
Last, Google says it is bringing the power of Google Lens’ AI technology to Google Images. This will help Google Images better analyze and detect objects, making them more easily searched. Google says Lens will also let people draw on any part of an image to trigger related results for that portion of the image.
All these changes are rolling out to mobile devices and the web over the next few weeks.
