In a meeting of all employees held in March, the head of search at Google, Prabhakar Raghavan, told company executives that “things have changed” and that they are “not like they were 15 or 20 years ago,” according to a recording of the meeting obtained by CNBC. “It’s not that life is always going to be smooth,” Raghavan added.
Raghavan also referred to the new competitors in the meeting, according to the media: “They may have a new gadget out there that people like to play with, but they still turn to Google to verify what they see there because it is the trusted source and that becomes more critical in this era of generative AI“.
Google search has changed little over the decades, but the rise of AI has forced it to do so. The company said last year that it was “powering up” and “improving” the search experience for users with a generative AI-driven version called Search Generative Experience (SGE).
The SGE is still in its infancy, but Google started testing “AI summaries” about a month ago, offering some users in the United States and the United Kingdom a summary of search results generated by AI.
And it is that searches continue to be a crucial part of Alphabet’s business, Google’s parent company, with revenues of $48 billion in the last three months of last year (about $5 billion more than in the same period in 2022).
Raghavan’s warning to employees comes at a time when rivals like the startup Perplexity AI, which has sponsors like Jeff Bezos and Nvidia, are trying to challenge Google’s dominance by developing their own search engines.
