Google used to be a search engine. Now it wants to be everything

Twenty years ago, if you asked the average person what Google was, they’d tell you it was a search engine. The company became synonymous with searching for information online, reaching a level of dominance no search engine had seen before, or has seen since. Ask the average person today and they’d probably tell you the same thing. Except Google isn’t just that anymore. It’s a far more complicated company, one trying to be all things to all people, and arguably succeeding at none of them. Google is now a five-layer company, says David Bader, director of the Institute for Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. One of the key layers is AI, which could account for $185 billion in capital expenditure this year, “larger than the GDP of most countries,” according to Bader. That level of spending signals how dramatically the company has changed direction. “No serious search-only company spends like this,” he says. That focus on AI is increasingly visible to end users, with AI layered into more and more Google products. “They’re shoving Gemini into every nook and cranny, whether it’s GSuite, whether it’s email, whether it’s Maps, whatever,” says Alex Hanna, a former Google employee and director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute. Still, there remains a gap between what Google is, depending on who you ask and where they sit. “There’s how Google sees itself internally, which I think is they see themselves a bit more as an AI company,” says Hanna. That contrasts with how much of the world still sees the company: primarily as a search engine. And, in Hanna’s view, that experience has deteriorated. “When you use Google Search, it’s trash. It sucks,” she says. Hanna argues that the decline in search quality is partly tied to the way Google is reshaping its business model for the post-ChatGPT era, one in which AI can bypass traditional search entirely and reduce the need for users to visit either a search engine or the websites it indexes. Adverti