Summary
A lot of Google’s AI browsing experiments are not experiments anymore—AI Overviews and the new AI Mode are as prominent as they get, and Google is pushing them a lot. Now, the company is looking to remake one of the few parts of the search experience that remain untouched by AI: search results.
Google has announced a new experiment in its Search Labs platform called “Web Guide,” which would be set to change how search results are displayed to you. Since Google was launched in 1998, you’re shown a simple list of websites after putting your search query, with more relevant or more popular results popping up at the very top. Aside from the inclusion of AI Overviews which sometimes pop up before these results, the search results themselves are relatively unchanged in this new, crazy AI era.
The way Web Guide works is something like an alternate version of the search results you know and love, and it seems to be a middle point between old-fashioned web browsing and full-blown AI browsing. It’s powered by a custom version of Google’s Gemini AI model. According to the company’s announcement, this model analyzes your query and the content of web pages across the internet. It then organizes the findings into distinct groups based on different facets of the search topic. The end result is an automatically categorized and grouped list of web pages, which might be a better fit for complex or open-ended searches while still providingsomesearch results.
Just like AI Mode, Web Guide mode has its own “Web” tab separate from the “All” tab where regular search results live, though Google might eventually try and replace the old ones with these new, AI-fueled ones. The system employs a “query fan-out” technique, a method also used in other Google AI features. When you enter a query, the system concurrently runs multiple related, more specific searches in the background. This process gathers a wider pool of information, which the Gemini model then synthesizes and organizes into the thematic groups displayed on the results page.
The silver lining from this is that Google appears not to be completely done with regular search results, as it’s looking into ways to integrate those into the AI era. But I’m still torn on this. You will still be served with fewer results than what you’d get from a regular search, but in theory, you’ll be served with more “useful” results more relevant to your search. The other part is trusting Google to rank search results based on usefulness, and trusting this custom Gemini model to find stuff that’s relevant to your query. Both AI Overviews and AI Mode have been shown to make mistakes extremely frequently, so it’ll be fun to see Web Guide make mistakes like those when it needs to give you actual websites to click on.
