NPR Topics: Business•May 22
Ask AI or just Google it? Google makes a big change to a little search box
The company this week announced significant changes to its search box — that austere, single-line input field on its homepage that has been the world's most popular entry point into the web for around two-and-a-half decades. But the shift is, in some ways, not surprising, given Silicon Valley's hard pivot toward AI, with Google and others investing billions in the technology and refocusing corporate strategies around it. Roberts, director of the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry at UCLA, said the algorithmic underpinnings of Google's web search results have long been "by design, inscrutable to end users" and there's more to it than simply the best of the web floating to the top of any given search.
