Can Google still dominate search in the age of AI chatbots?

For the first time in a generation, its monopoly is under threat. After two years of false starts, the company is trying to regain the initiative.

- Stephen Morris, Melissa Heikkila and Cristina Criddle

At Google's flagship conference for developers last week, co-founder Sergey Brin made a surprise appearance to emphasize just how important artificial intelligence will be to the company's future.

Mr Brin revealed that he was working in Google's AI lab every day, pushing its engineers to be the first to achieve artificial general intelligence, a system that surpasses the ability of humans.

"Honestly, anybody who's a computer scientist should not be retired, they should be working," he said. "AI will be vastly more transformative" than the internet or the mobile phone.

The more immediate question for the company is the challenge from AI to Google's domination of the online search business, which has been under threat for the first time in a generation since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022.

After two years of false starts when it is widely seen to have squandered some of its advantage, Google last week made its most decisive move yet to try and regain the initiative.

Chief executive Sundar Pichai used the conference to launch what he called a "total reimagining of search" to address the challenge from AI chatbots. What the company is calling "AI mode" will be embedded in its search bar, browser and apps, allowing users to receive conversational answers to questions instead of a list of blue links.

The project is the centrepiece of Google's vision for the future of search — one heavily influenced by the runaway success of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT — that seeks to leverage its Gemini large language models, data centres, user base and network of apps.

INNOVATOR'S DILEMMA

Yet, as it embarks on such a major overhaul, Google and its parent Alphabet must confront what is sometimes called the innovators' dilemma: how to integrate this new way of finding information online without jeopardizing its US$198 billion (S$254 billion) in advertising revenues from search.