Buckle up, again? Google Search will continue to change profoundly in 2025, according to Alphabet/Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who was interviewed during the 2024 New York Times DealBook Summit.

Google Search in 2025. Typically elusive on substance and details, here’s the quote from Pichai:

• “Search itself will continue to change profoundly in [2025]. I think we are going to be able to tackle more complex questions than ever before. I think you’ll be surprised even early in [2025] the kind of newer things search can do compared to where it is today.”

Pichai said the company applied AI most aggressively in search:

• “The gaps in search quality [were] all based on transformers. Internally, we call it and you know we made search multimodal, the search quality improvements. We were improving the language understanding of search. That’s why we built transformers in the company.
• “If you look at the last couple of years, we have, with AI overviews, Gemini is being used by over a billion users in search alone. I just feel like we are getting started.”

Why we care. Search has profoundly changed since the rise of generative AI in late 2022. In April 2023, Pichai said the search would continue to change over the next decade, and earlier this year, that search would continue to evolve towards search generative experience, the predecessor of AI Overviews.

Content flood. In a world in which you’re flooded with so much content, Pichai argued that Google search becomes even more valuable:

• “If anything, I think something like search becomes more valuable. In a world in which you’re inundated with content, you’re trying to find trustworthy content. Content that makes sense to you in a way reliably you can use it. I think it becomes more valuable.
• “… Look, information is the essence of humanity. We’ve been on a curve on information. When Facebook came around, people had an entirely new way of getting information. YouTube Facebook… I can keep going on and on. I think the problem with a lot of those constructs is they are zero sum in their inherent outlook. They just feel like people are consuming information in a certain limited way and people are all dividing that up. But that’s not the reality of what people are doing.

Traffic and fair use. There was also an interesting exchange where the interviewer, Andrew Ross Sirkin, tried to push Pichai on whether Google is providing enough credit and traffic to content creators. Pichai clearly had nothing to say about the search side, so he pivoted away to focus on YouTube creators rather than websites. Here are those exchanges:

Sorkin: You have more content than anybody… The value of that content. You have my emails on Gmail. You have, if I’ve uploaded video or somebody else has uploaded video about me on YouTube. I’m sure people have cut and pasted articles that I’ve written or other things. How should we think about that and the value of it. You know it’s very interesting because if you were going to write a book, you could go to the library and maybe read 30 books. You could maybe go buy some other books and you could take all that information in your head and hopefully you footnote it or put in the bibliography. But you could probably only do that once. It’d be very hard for you to take all the information to learn it and then spit it out a million times. You get to spit it out a million times a day. I just wonder what the economics of that should be for the folks that create it in the beginning.

Pichai: …While it’s often debated, we spend a lot of time thinking about the traffic we send to the ecosystem. Even through the moment through the transition over the past couple of years. It’s an important priority for us.

…I think there’s always going to be a balance between understanding what is fair use when a new technology comes versus how do you give value back proportionate to the value of the IP – the hard work people have put in.

Sorkin: But you think there should be different rules around fair use in the in the AI era?

Pichai: Look these are important issues, which I’m sure Congress, the Supreme Court, everyone is going to be in –

Sorkin: I think they will, but they if they do they’ll be late. That’s the thing, right? This already moved past us. So all this information has been hoovered up and people have learned from that. And, to the extent that there are folks who use your services and other services they’re beneficiaries of that. But it’s not clear that the original creator is the beneficiary right now.

Content licensing. The conversation later turned to the future of the “blue link economy,” with Sorkin asking whether Google would send “checks to creators that created even an idea or a fact that you were able to collect along the way?”

Pichai pointed out that it licensed content from Reddit, the Associated Press, and New York Times. But clearly, Google is not licensing all the content it “hoovers” up. Here’s that exchange:

Sorkin: …Do you see a day where instead of the Blue Link economy, if you will, that you actually are going to be sending checks to creators that created even an idea or a fact that you were able to collect along the way?

Pichai: I mean down the line well we are licensing content for AI today. We are we are doing that where we see value.

Sorkin: …One of the things is fascinating to me. You’re licensing data for example from Reddit right? But what’s so interesting about that is the folks on Reddit are just typing away for free. It’s a fascinating business model.

Pichai: Look, we license data from Reddit. We license data from AP. We license data from New York Times. We do it across the world in variety of ways. But I think over time, will there be models by which people can create? There’ll be a marketplace in the future, I think. There’ll be creators who will create for AI models or something like that and get paid for it. I definitely think you know that’s that’s part of the future and people will figure it out.

The video. Building the Future: Sundar Pichai on A.I., Regulation and What’s Next for Google (New York Times Events on YouTube).