With Changing Time, Google Wants to Be More than a Search Engine

Google wants to compete with TikTok and Instagram and be more than a search engine

Google is trying to blow up how you think about search. To say it's pivoting to compete in a world where TikTok and Instagram are changing the way the internet works would be an overstatement… but not a big one. Google now exists on a more visual, interactive internet, in which users want to be surprised and delighted as often as they just want an answer to their questions. In that world, what is a search engine even for? The Google you see tomorrow might not be completely different, but the change is already starting.

At its annual Search On event today, Google showed off a bunch of new ways for people to search the internet. Most of them continue the trend of Google's last few years: trying to find more natural and more visual ways for people to input searches and get results. You can now ask Google a question by taking a picture or rambling into your phone's microphone rather than trying to type the perfect set of keywords into the search bar. And Google is looking for more ways to present the information you might care about without having to ask.

It's an interesting thought experiment, really: what would Google's equivalent of TikTok's For You page look like? Google's search team doesn't know exactly, but it's working on it. And at least so far, it looks like the answer will start to appear on the homepage of Google's iOS app. That's where many of Google's new features are getting their start and where lots of customers are already interacting with Google in new ways.

In interviews ahead of the event, Google executives said over and over that search is undergoing a total reinvention. For two decades, "roughly the rules of the game are, 'Dear human, if you follow the rules and script your queries just right, we'll give you amazing answers to your needs,'" says Prabhakar Raghavan, Google's SVP in charge of the search. "But thanks to incredible — and frankly unprecedented — advances in AI and machine learning and computer vision, the tables are turning now."