What is search, anyway? At Google I/O this week, Google made that question even harder to answer, as Search absorbed more of Gemini’s AI capabilities and moved further beyond the familiar list of blue links.
For decades, we directed Google or Bing to fetch us a list of pages in which we could find the answers we seek. Now, search engines are acting more like butlers, anticipating what we want before we want it based on what they know about us. It’s not too much of a stretch to anticipate that search and AI are blurring and will probably simply merge at some point. As announced at I/O, Google Search is soaking up even more of Google’s AI capabilities, with an expanded search box plus personal agents, while Gemini itself is taking on more tasks such as delivering a daily brief that would normally be associated with a personal aide or attaché.
Today, what we might have called notifications in past eras are now the domain of agents. Google wants you to ask them to keep their eyes open for anything—low plane fares, news about Taylor Swift, updates from your apartment complex, and so on. Two key additions are search agents and a personal agent called Spark.
It’s hard to separate one from the other, just like it’s a challenge to distinguish Gemini within Google’s Workspace apps from the Gemini app itself. They’re blending together.
The rise of agents continues
Spark is Google’s new 24/7 personal agent that works on your behalf. Right now, it’s somewhat basic: you can set recurring tasks or triggers, or teach it skills like checking your inbox for updates from your kids’ school. Over time, however, Google has a roadmap of features planned for Spark, just like any of its other properties.
Of more immediate use, I think, is what Google calls a daily brief. That concept is not entirely new—Microsoft built a daily summary of upcoming events into Windows 10’s Cortana and later tried to move it into the mobile Outlook app. Google’s version, according to vice president of Google Labs Josh Woodward, “goes far beyond a simple summary. Daily Brief actively organizes and prioritizes based on your specific goals, even suggesting immediate next steps.” Whether it will prove effective remains to be seen. Not surprisingly, it benefits from connections to Gmail, your calendar, and other connected Google apps. It also requires a subscription, available to the AI Plus tier as well as the more rarified Pro and Ultra subscription models.
Search and Gemini: They’re on a collision course
AI Mode is Google’s controversial revamp of its search function. Like virtually everything else in Google’s ecosystem, Google Search now includes personal intelligence, mining your life for additional context. Google says AI Mode, which grudgingly links back to original sources, has reached one billion users. The search box is expanding, at least on mobile, to allow longer, more involved queries. You can now input something like “the best laptop like the one my cousin Mike had last summer at the house in Maine, but under $1,500,” with text, images, video, and even Chrome tabs as potential inputs.
Google is encouraging conversations rather than one-off queries. At this point, the line between a search and a prompt blurs even further, especially when AI Mode allows follow-up conversations. The new implementation is live today where AI Mode is already implemented. The impact on businesses like those that rely on search referrals is significant, but the technology itself offers new possibilities for agentic search.
Steam and Amazon already offer wishlists that track pricing and notify you when an item is on sale. Microsoft still implements Collections of stored tabs for ongoing research. Now Google is adding search agents that will monitor an existing question and provide answers. As head of search Liz Reid says, “With information agents, you can stay updated on whatever matters most to you. Your agent will intelligently look across everything on the web, including blogs, news sites, social posts, and the freshest data, such as real-time information on finance, shopping, and sports, to monitor for changes related to your specific question.”
Beginning this summer, you’ll be able to allow Google to reserve restaurants and other venues—and even pay. This is a capability where AI has feared to tread, but Google is pressing ahead. The company is also using its own version of Claude Code, called Antigravity, to build small apps right within search itself. Rather than building full-fledged applications, Antigravity creates small visual explanations of how tasks work or how concepts play out in the real world, such as a black hole’s effect on time and space or how a Roman aqueduct may have been constructed.
Agentic search can answer questions like “who is the current leader in the California governor’s race polling?” or “how much money has OpenAI raised in 2026?” Like it or not, Google is one of the architects of the modern search experience and how we look for information. Anecdotally, Google still has 90 percent of the world’s search traffic, according to StatCounter. The issue is how the problem is defined—how many people are simply searching via ChatGPT or Claude? Ongoing agent-based searches and conversational follow-ups will keep users within Google’s fold, where its management is desperate that they remain.
Source: PCWorld News