By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 19th, 2024
A Google spokeswoman stated that they are excited about introducing new AI-powered features such as ‘Lens’ and multi-search to its search engine.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has currently stormed the tech world with popular tools like ChatGPT and others gaining massive traction. To keep pace with the dramatic overhaul in the tech space, Google is reportedly rushing to update its search engine.
The development comes as Google faces a threat from competitors that use AI on their platforms. Also, the panic spread when Google discovered that Samsung Electronics is now looking to replace the default Google search engine with Microsoft’s Bing, as per the New York Times report.
Now, if the world’s leading smartphone maker Samsung is indeed looking to make this shift, it puts $3 billion in annual revenue at risk for Google. With the Bing search engine adding the OpenAI technology at its end, its threat to Google’s search dominance has grown exponentially in recent months. OpenAI has recently demonstrated the power of chatbot services like ChatGPT, which is very capable of addressing multiple queries from users.
Last year in 2022, Samsung shipped a total of 261 smartphones, with all of them running Google’s Android software. The Korea-based smartphone manufacturer has a long-established partnership with both Google and Microsoft.
As a result, Samsung smartphones and other devices come pre-loaded with apps offered by both these tech giants. The NY Times report adds that negotiations are still going and Samsung might as well decide to keep Google as its default browser.
Google Works on Upgrading Its Search Engine with AI Tools
In order to avoid losing ground, Google is working on several projects in order to update as well as renew its search services. This includes adding AI features to its existing services, under the project named Magi.
In a statement, Lara Levin, a Google spokeswoman, said that Google is “excited about bringing new AI-powered features to search and will share more details soon”. She added that it would dramatically improve the quality of results while also introducing new ways to search such as Lens and multi-search.
However, Google has so far not commented on the company’s negotiations with Samsung. Google currently dominates the market share in mobile devices being the default search engine on both Android as well as Apple devices. Similar to Samsung, Google’s deal with Apple Inc. is roughly valued at $20 billion in annual revenue.
Google is quite used to large language models such as the ones underpinning ChatGPT as well as the functionality in Microsoft’s Bing. Just last month, Google released early access to Google Bard, its own version of the ChatGPT rival.