An artificial intelligence injection that's been dubbed the biggest change to Google Search in years is coming to Australia, allowing users to ask more complex questions.
The search giant this morning announced it would be rolling out AI Mode, its "most powerful AI search experience yet", in Australia and more than 40 other countries this week.
It's just one small tab on your computer or smartphone search page but the company says it will make a big difference to search, offering something that's different to both traditional internet scouring and new chat-based AI tools.
Vice president of product management Hema Budaraju said Australian users would start seeing a new tab called AI Mode alongside their standard search options.
"Once you click into that, you should be able to ask any question, literally any question on your mind, and then receive a predictable AI response that has got many ways to engage with the web, as well as the ability to ask a follow-up," she told 9News.
She used examples such as figuring out which clubs someone just starting out in golf should buy or how to handle a weird error message thrown up by a washing machine.
"How might you be able to just take a picture of that and ask, 'Hey, is this a normal error? What should I do? Can I fix this by myself? Do I need to call technician?'," she said.
"Now, remember in a world where it was very keyword driven, this would have been many, many searches and hours of agony, and now you can literally just take a picture and ask for information."
AI Mode uses what Google calls a query fan-out, meaning it analyses your natural-language or image query and breaks it off into many different queries that it knits back into an answer the company says can be both broader and deeper than a traditional search, but still accompanied by links.
Google gave the example of creating yourself a walking tour around Melbourne to check out specialty coffee shops, galleries and street art, then asking where you could stop for lunch and dinner along the way.
Budaraju said people were "not looking just for an AI response" but also wanted to be connected to web results they could use in a "very intuitive, simple, frictionless manner".
AI Mode is based on Google's Gemini AI models and real-time information from the search engine and can search using text, voice or photos but users can still opt for traditional searches.
Budaraju said it was distinct from the Gemini chatbot, which she said might offer more creative answers while AI Mode was more focused on finding information.
She said more than 100 million people in the US and India had used the new search option since it rolled out there earlier this year.
Although Google's parent company Alphabet has its finger in everything from online video and email to mobile phones and self-driving cars, Search is its baby, raking in almost $US200 billion ($303 billion) a year.
That means there's a lot riding on even small changes to a product that's used trillions of times a year by billions of people.
But Google Search is facing increasing competition from large-language-model AI competitors. According to market research firm SparkToro, Google still powers 210 times more searches than ChatGPT, but the use of LLMs is growing.
An Apple executive testified earlier this year that Google searches on Apple devices' Safari browser fell for the first time in 20 years.
While Google says it's put in a lot of work to make the new search feature as accurate as possible, it still warns people to double-check information for important topics.
"As with any early-stage AI product, we won't always get it right, but we are committed to continuous improvement," Budaraju wrote in a blog post published this morning.
There are also some unanswered questions around electricity and water usage and the impact AI search is having on the web.
In August this year, Google said the median text-based Gemini query used about 0.00024kWh, eight times more than the commonly cited figure for a normal Google search. But that figure is from 2009 so some researchers suggest it could be much much lower thanks to advancements in computing efficiency.
"The per-prompt energy impact is equivalent to watching TV for less than nine seconds," Google said in a blog post.
"At the same time, our AI systems are becoming more efficient through research innovations and software and hardware efficiency improvements.
"For example, over a recent 12 month period, the energy and total carbon footprint of the median Gemini Apps text prompt dropped by 33x and 44x, respectively, all while delivering higher quality responses."
It's unclear how much AI Mode uses compared to a normal search or a Gemini prompt.
In terms of the web, many online publishers have reported seeing their traffic drop alongside the introduction of Google's AI Overviews, raising the spectre of a "Google zero" future where searches no longer send any clicks to the websites that rely on them.
Google claims people are "visiting a greater diversity of websites" from AI overviews and says the people who click through them are more likely to spend more time on the sites they visit.
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