• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 5, 2025

Google launched an experimental version of its search engine Wednesday that eliminates its 10 blue links in favor of an AI-generated summary.

The AI Mode, a new tab within Google Search, is available through the Google Search Labs experiment. It goes beyond AI Overviews with a more immersive interface that provides advanced reasoning, thinking and multimodal capabilities.

Robby Stein,vice president of product at Google Search, described the mode as a “query fan-out” technique that serves multiple related searches simultaneously across subtopics and through multiple data sources. Then it combines the results to serve a response.

“This approach helps you access more breadth and depth of information than a traditional search on Google,” Stein wrote in a post.

If someone asks about the difference in sleep-tracking features between a smart ring, smartwatch and tracking mat, the custom version of Gemini 2.0 relies on a multi-step approach to determine where it will get the information, conduct searches, and adjust the plan based on what it finds.

The platform also allows people to ask follow-up questions like “what exercise is best for your heart rate?” or “is there a specific food to keep your heart rate consistent without having glucose spikes?”

Stein explained how AI Mode is “rooted” in Google’s core quality and ranking system. It is using “novel” ways based on reasoning to improve factuality.

The goal is to serve AI-powered responses as much as possible, but in cases where Google does not have high confidence in output as being helpful and based on quality, the response will be a set of web search results.

“We aim for AI responses in Search to present information objectively based on what’s available on the web, it’s possible that some responses may unintentionally appear to take on a persona or reflect a particular opinion,” he wrote.

Google also Gemini 2.0 for AI Overviews in the U.S. today to help with more difficult questions -- beginning with coding, advanced math and multimodal queries.

With Gemini 2.0’s advanced capabilities, Google provides faster and higher-quality responses and shows AI Overviews more often for these types of queries.