Google, the company synonymous with web search, gave us a glimpse of the future of search today at its "Google I/O" developer conference. This involves artificial intelligence (AI), of course, but not in the way you might think.

The future of Google search is artificial intelligence, but it's not what you might think. Google is not entirely keen on artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, although the company is working on one such product, the Bard.

And Google hasn't redesigned its home page to look more like a Chatgpt-style messaging system. Instead, Google is putting AI front and center in the most valuable area of the Internet: current search results.

At the conference today, Liz Reid, Google's vice president of search, showed us the trend. She opened her laptop and typed into the Google search box: "Why is Sourdough still so popular?" When you hit Enter, Google immediately returns normal search results.

But at the same time, above them, a rectangular orange section glows and says "generative AI on trial."After a few seconds, the glowing section is replaced by an AI-generated summary: several paragraphs detailing the taste of sourdough bread, the benefits of its probiotic powers, and so on. To the right, there are also links to three websites with information that Reed said "corroborates" the summary.

This is the new look of Google's search results page, "AI First," and it's colorful and completely different from what we're used to. Google calls it "AI Snapshot."

"For families with children under 3 and dogs, which is better, Bryce Canyon or Arch?"

It's powered by PaLM 2, Google's latest AI language model, and we were very impressed in our demo. It has also changed the way people experience search, especially on mobile devices, where "AI snapshots" often devour the entire first page of your search results.

It should be noted that to access AI Snapshot, you must select a new feature called Search Generation Experience (SGE). Not all searches elicit an AI answer, only if Google's algorithms deem it more useful than the standard results.

Google executives say SGE is still an experiment. But they also know that this is a fundamental long-term change in the way people search. AI adds another layer of input to help you ask better, richer questions; It also adds another output layer, designed to answer your questions and lead you to new answers.

Compared to Microsoft's "AI Bing" redesign or ChatGPT's brand new design, the "AI Snapshot" at the top of search results may seem like a small move by Google, but SGE is the first step toward a complete rethink of how billions of people find information online, and how Google makes money.

In other words, Bard isn't the future of Google search, but AI is. Over time, SGE will move out of the lab and into the search results of billions of users, mixing the generated information with web links. It will change Google's business and could upend parts of the way the Web works.