Google dropped a slew of new goodies at today’s I/O event. From Project Astra to the new Imagen AI image generator, Google has a lot of new toys for us to play with. But that doesn’t mean that the foundation of Google’s services isn’t getting an update as well.

What's new in Search?

The incoming updates were presented by Google’s Vice President of Search, Liz Reid, and boil down to deep Gemini integration that’s capable of synthesizing advanced results (which Google calls AI Overview) from traditional results. Reid says that Google is leveraging its massive knowledge base of billions of facts, its advanced search capabilities, and the power of Gemini AI, to power its new, advanced search results. If you were lucky enough to get into Google’s Search Labs experiment, you’ve probably already seen some of these features first hand.

The example given by Reid (though not as a live demo) was searching for a nearby yoga or pilates studio. In the demo, Google/Gemini is able to filter through the results, finding highly rated studios within 30-minutes' walking distance from the user. Of course, these results will still be interspersed with paid placements, but Google says it will clearly distinguish ads.

One feature I’m keen to see is the new multistep reasoning and planning capabilities. Google showed off meal planning during the I/O live stream. The AI Overview in the demo organized nine easy-to-prepare meals and provided a link to export the plan. We didn’t see what that exported information would look like, however. A list of meal names isn’t much good without the recipe to go with it. Reid also teases that Google is working on a feature to populate a shopping cart with the items needed to make your meals. As of now, planning is limited to food and trips, but Google is looking forward to adding party, date, and workout planning.

Finally, Reid invited Rose Yao (VP of Product) onto the stage to do a live demo of the upcoming Video Search capability. In the demo, Yao asks Google why her record player isn’t working while showing a video of the problem. There was no word on when this feature would be available.

As of right now, all of these features are region locked to the US and are only available in English. Personally, I think this all looks pretty cool. I’m not looking for an AI girlfriend or a chatbot to do my work, but I’m in love with the idea of leveraging technology to make the mundane bits of my life easier. Hopefully, this AI infusion will resuscitate the flagging quality in Google search results and return us to the days of a user-friendly Google rather than a publisher-optimized one.