Recently, I asked Google to help me plan my daughter’s birthday party by finding a park in Oakland, California, with picnic tables. The site generated a list of parks nearby, so I went to scout two of them out — only to find there were, in fact, no tables.
“I was just there,” I typed to Google. “I didn’t see wooden tables.”
Google acknowledged the mistake and produced another list, which again included one of the parks with no tables.
I repeated this experiment by asking Google to find an affordable carwash. Google listed a service for $25, but when I arrived, a carwash cost $65.
I wasn’t doing traditional web searches on Google. I was testing the company’s new AI Mode, a tool that is similar to chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, where users can type in questions to get answers.
AI Mode, which is rolling out worldwide in the coming weeks, will soon appear as a tab next to your Google.com search results. The arrival of AI Mode underscores how new technology is redefining what it means to search for something online. For decades, a web search involved looking up keywords, like “most reliable car brands”, to show a list of relevant websites. Now, with generative AI, the technology that powers chatbots by using complex language models to guess what words belong together, you can ask more specific questions or make complicated requests.
What’s unique about AI Mode is that the technology stitches together data from Google’s vast empire of internet services to provide an answer to a query. When you type a question, it could pull data from search queries on Google.com, location information on Google Maps and Google’s shopping data on consumer products.
AI vs. Google Search
To help assess whether AI is the future of search, I tested the new tool against traditional Google searches for a multitude of personal tasks. The results were mixed, with lots of hits but also lots of misses, so I encourage people to use AI Mode with caution. Here’s how it went.
Searching for Things and Places: Google search is the winner by a long shot. AI Mode’s suggestions were sometimes accurate, but failing to check its answers could lead you down the wrong path and waste your time.
Product Research: I asked Google’s AI to help me research toddler car seats. This is where I saw the technology’s potential to become very useful. AI Mode is the winner. It’s a nifty shopping tool, though it’s still wise to do a Google search to double-check the prices.
A traditional Google search is still best for the simple act of looking for things to do nearby, but AI Mode could prove to be a nifty tool for more tedious tasks like product research for online shopping. Just always check the answers.
New York Times News Service