Inside Google's Generative AI Reinvention — With Nick Fox and Liz Reid

Summary

Big Technology Podcast: Inside Google's Generative AI Reinvention — With Nick Fox & Liz Reid
Host: Alex Kantrowitz
Guests: Nick Fox (SVP of Knowledge & Information, Google), Liz Reid (VP of Search, Google)
Date: August 20, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode explores how Google is navigating the generative AI revolution, shifting its core products, adapting organizationally, and confronting the implications for users, publishers, and the broader web. Host Alex Kantrowitz delves deeply with Google executives Nick Fox and Liz Reid about organizational change, search innovation, publisher impact, and the evolving vision for how we access information online.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Embracing Generative AI: Strategy and Organizational Reinvention

• Google’s History of Reinvention:
  Fox reflects that Google has always embraced technological leaps (e.g., desktop-to-mobile) as crucial inflection points for expanding the product and the business.

  “If you look over that course of history, each of the technology revolutions… have been fuel for the company.” (03:01, Nick Fox)

• Strategic Approach to AI:
  Google quickly experiments but with a focus on user trust and product purpose. Rapid innovation is balanced with careful rollout and extensive evaluation—especially given the risk of AI hallucination.

  “We have theses of where things are gonna go... We embrace it from an early stage because it’s clear that’s what our users are going to look for.” (03:36, Nick Fox)

• Labs as a Testing Ground:
  Both AI Overviews and AI Mode started in “Labs” before broad rollout. This enables experimentation with engaged users, providing a controlled path from R&D to production.

  “We start in labs... get our feet wet and then we build confidence through that to actually know when it’s ready for everyone.” (05:42, Nick Fox)

2. Reinventing the Search Experience: AI Mode, Multimodality, and Fluid Interactions

• AI Mode Rollout and Adoption:
  Recently released to all U.S. users (and expanding internationally), “AI Mode” delivers conversational, LLM-based search.

  “We have a small set of people and growing that are really power users... issuing longer queries, experimenting in different ways.” (06:42, Liz Reid)

• Future of Search: Hybrid Experience:
  Fox and Reid envision a spectrum—from simple navigational queries to in-depth conversational explorations. Users can interact across text, voice, and images, depending on their needs.

  “I don’t think use cases are all one or the other. I think we’ll see people interact fluidly.” (08:29, Liz Reid) “I probably do about half of my personal AI mode queries by voice.” (20:56, Nick Fox)

• Intelligent Query Routing:
  Google aims to evolve toward a unified experience where the system infers user intent and responds with the right modality—whether that’s a direct link or a conversational answer.

  “If I type in ‘big technology’, it’s like, oh, you want the link, here’s the link. Or if I type in a longer query, ... it should maybe have some understanding of the intent.” (10:01, Alex Kantrowitz)

3. Impact on Publishers, SEO, and the Web Ecosystem

• AI SEO ("GEO?") and Content Optimization:
  Marketers are scrambling to adapt, but Google’s guidance is unchanged: focus on quality, in-depth content—not on gaming the algorithm.

  “Our general advice… is actually the same. What’s particularly helpful in generative AI is deeper content...” (12:24, Nick Fox) “Could you stop working on trying to figure how you focus on the system and really just [ask], is this content that you as a user would want to go read and spend five minutes on?” (13:42, Liz Reid)

• AI Overviews, Traffic, and Publisher Anxiety:
  There’s tension between providing rich in-search summaries and driving clicks to the web. Google executives argue their model is “web-forward,” with prominent linking and attribution, and site traffic remains overall “stable.”

  “We have built both AI overviews and AI mode to be very web forward.” (30:52, Nick Fox) “If you look holistically, traffic to the web from search has been stable over time.” (32:09, Nick Fox)

• Evolving Publisher Relationships:
  Google is in frequent dialogue with publishers, emphasizing that high-quality, original content will continue to surface and thrive—even as the media landscape shifts to forums, podcasts, and new formats.

  “Standing still is not going to work for any of us... we all really do want to find a way to make this work for publishers, for media.” (40:14, Liz Reid)

• Long-Term Risks:
  If the web’s content ecosystem erodes due to traffic declines, Google recognizes it would risk undermining its entire value proposition.

  “A search engine ceases to exist if there’s no web to search over... it really is the ecosystem with which and on which Google search operates. And so we deeply care about it.” (38:31, Nick Fox)

4. Evolution of Interaction: Conversational, Voice, and Visual Search

• Expansion into Voice and Agentic Experiences:
  Users increasingly use voice for longer queries and multitasking. Google is piloting “SearchLive” for more fluid and conversational search, but resists moving toward highly personalized emotional “companions.”

  “Voice is already a big part of search. I expect it’ll be a growing part of search as well, particularly as queries get longer.” (21:00, Nick Fox)

• Visual Search and “Lens”:
  Google Lens, and features like ‘Circle to Search,’ are growing rapidly—especially with younger users and for use cases like homework help and shopping via social images.

  “Lens is doing on fire. The combination of lens and AI overviews is doubly on fire.” (50:00, Liz Reid)

• Remixing Content Across Modalities:
  The ability for generative AI to transform content (e.g., from articles to podcasts) is lowering the barrier for creation and broadening how users consume information.

  “The last thing I think that’s kind of still very underexplored is transforming content... this ability to take content in one form and transform it into another without so much work.” (56:07, Liz Reid)

5. Ads, Shopping, and Revenue Growth in the Age of AI

• Sustainable Business Model:
  Google search revenue continues to accelerate, driven by growing query volume (particularly for complex queries), effective integration of ads into AI-enhanced results, and smarter ad matching via generative AI.

  “Queries continue to grow... a lot of that is propelled by generative AI... As we drive more queries, those queries monetize and we have an existing advertising model.” (43:22, Nick Fox)

• Shopping Transformation:
  Generative AI enables deep product research, comparison, and discovery—including for non-traditional or highly specific shopping queries. Virtual try-on and other features lower return rates and expand commerce potential.

  “You can describe [an item] to a friend or a salesperson... Generative AI lets you actually start to describe what do you actually want.” (46:34, Liz Reid)

6. The Exponential AI Curve & Future of Creation

• Where Are We on the AI Curve?
  Both Fox and Reid strongly believe we are at the very beginning of an exponential rise in generative AI capability, especially as models improve at reasoning, tool use, and lowering the “cost” of finding information.

  “I believe it’s closer to the latter... The opportunity that generative AI technology brings for a product like search is massively vast. And I think we’re really, really early on in it.” (54:00, Nick Fox) “Models are getting much better at reasoning and... at tool use.” (55:00, Liz Reid)

• Content Creation Explosion:
  Barriers to multimodal content creation are coming down, portending an even larger, more diverse web—provided incentives remain for creators.

  “I think the web will be much bigger... the barrier for creation of content, multimodal, but as text as well, will come down quite a bit.” (61:21, Nick Fox)

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Notable Quotes

• On Web Forward AI Search:
  “It is a losing battle to fight users. There’s a user change happening here... If they’re looking for a summary, we should not stand in the way.” (31:14, Nick Fox)

• On Publisher Adaptation:
  “Standing still is not going to work for any of us. Search Included. But we all really do want to find a way to make this work for publishers.” (40:14, Liz Reid)

• On the Most Exciting Moment at Google:
  “To me, it feels like Google when I started—there’s a strong feeling of the sky’s the limit, a strong feeling of opportunity... it’s such a fast pace, I can’t even remember. That’s fun.” (58:04, Nick Fox)

• On Moving Fast, With Caution:
  “We need to build quickly, experiment quickly, and then make sure we’re shipping to the billions of users... when things are ready.” (62:23, Nick Fox)

  “Not at the expense of trust, but can you go faster? ... I don’t want to be complacent. I’d rather worry.” (63:32, Liz Reid)

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Segment Timestamps

• Google’s approach to AI & reinvention: 01:34–05:42
• AI mode rollout, use cases, conversational search: 06:30–11:30
• AI SEO & publisher guidance: 11:48–15:16
• Expanding perspectives, web content, multiple views: 15:16–17:32
• Voice, agentic search, avatars & conversational future: 19:40–22:12
• Publishers, web traffic, and monetization: 28:24–40:14
• Ad model, shopping & commerce evolution: 42:50–49:25
• Lens, visual search, multimodal input: 49:37–51:14
• NotebookLM, content remixing, podcasts: 51:14–53:24
• Where are we on the AI growth curve?: 53:24–57:28
• Barriers to content creation falling: 61:21–62:23
• How fast can (or should) Google change?: 62:23–64:04

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Memorable Moments

• Glue on Pizza, Eating Rocks:
  Liz Reid recounts how AI hallucinations revealed rare but notable errors—prompting reevaluation of evaluation processes and grounding.

  “You mentioned eat rocks... People previously did not come to Google search and say how many rocks should I eat today...” (26:58, Liz Reid)

• On User Trust:
  Maintaining user trust is the fundamental constraint on Google’s willingness to experiment and release features.

  “If Google breaks up with you, then you’re going to have a very different feel of what Google is for the rest of your life.” (22:12, Alex Kantrowitz / Nick Fox)

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Conclusion

Nick Fox and Liz Reid provided an in-depth look at Google’s balancing act: embracing rapid generative AI transformation, protecting and amplifying the web, supporting creators, and remaining cautious custodians of user trust. Their optimism about AI’s exponential potential and their candid discussion on publisher economics, product strategy, and future modalities showcase how Google is approaching its biggest reinvention in decades—one they hope will empower both users and creators in the years ahead.

Transcript

[A]

How is generative AI changing Google and how does Google think it's going to change everything for all of us? Let's talk about it right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool headed and nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Today we're going to go deep into how Google is handling the generative AI challenge or opportunity, with two of the executives spearheading the change within the company. We're joined today by Nick Frank Fox, he's the SVP of knowledge and information at Google. Nick, great to see you. Welcome to the show.

[B]

Great to be here.

[A]

And we're also joined by returning champion Liz Reed, the VP of Search at Google. Liz, great to see you.

[C]

Delighted to be invited back.

[A]

So, Nick, you and I spoke for my book Always Day One, which was a book about reinvention. And the idea was there are going to be technology shifts that tech companies are going to have to deal with and the ones that stay relevant are the ones that get ahead of change. I think we both agree that this generative AI moment is a moment of radical change in tech.

[B]

I agree.

[A]

How do you figure out the timeline with which you are willing to implement change? Because this technology is moving extremely fast and it's not moving fast in a uniform fashion. Right. There's going to be moments where it will excel in some areas and not in others. And in some moments it'll be able to handle certain challenges, but then you add something new and, and then it hallucinates more. So with such a quick changing technology, such a powerful technology, how do you plan, how do you move forward with this change?

[B]

First of all, great to be here. Thanks for having us both. I think Google search is a story of reinvention through really for Google's entire history. If you think about, you could think about the mobile revolution was a moment of reinvention, of search searches. Going from desktop to a mobile device. What does that mean? Will people still search through that moment? What does it mean for advertising, et cetera? Google embraces these moments of reinvention. If we look out, I've been at Google for 22 years. Liz has also been at Google for 22 years. We look over that course of history, each of the technology revolutions, each of the technology leaps have been fuel for the company, they've been fuel for the product. They have been the things that have dramatically expanded what search can do. And so we're excited by them and we embrace them. So we tend to be very quick to embrace them. Sometimes we embrace them in small ways. To get started with. So generative AI is an example. We had Bert, we had mum as ranking improvements way back in the early days, really, as the technology was new, that enables us to get our feet wet with it. Those were maybe relatively more subtle changes relative to where we are today. But we embrace quickly, we are sort of careful, we are thoughtful about it mostly more than anything else, because we care deeply, deeply about trust.

[A]

Right. But I understand all these things. I guess the question that I'm asking you, though, is everybody in the tech world right now is saying there are all these new capabilities. Some of them are working, some of them don't. How do you organizationally say we're gonna pursue this route? I mean, it is a technology that. Let's say I'm a startup, right? I can just throw the latest model in, see if it works. If it doesn't, roll it back. Google doesn't have that luxury. So you have to be really sure about where things are going. Do you have a process internally where you're just like, we're gonna bet on this. We're not. I mean, everything else you're saying makes sense. But talk about specifically how you think about this stuff.

[B]

I would say we have theses of where things are gonna go. Right. And so early on, we understood that generative AI as a technology was going to be. This is technology that's right at the core of information. And so we understood that that would be transformative for how search works. That was in some ways a relatively obvious area to lean into. But other areas we view it from, in many of these areas, I would say all of these areas, in fact, we view it from the standpoint of what are we trying to do with the product. So if you look at something like agentic, right? This is a. It's clear that users want to get things done in search, right? If you're looking for a hotel, you ultimately want to go book that hotel. If you're looking for a product, you ultimately want to go buy that product. And so that's an area. It's clear that that's the future. It's clear that that's where things are going to go. So again, we embrace it. And even if it's early, our view is to embrace it from an early stage because it's clear that's what our users are going to look for, and it's clear that's where things are going.

[A]

Okay, Liz, I promise I'm going to get to you in a second, but I have to follow up here. You speak about Agentic. This goes exactly to the question I'm asking you here. We've seen Google, we've seen Amazon, we've seen Apple all try to roll out this contextually aware assistant that gets things done for you. I don't think anyone's doing a great job right now of it. I mean, just to be honest and from a user experience, a part of that, is the technology ready for it. I think, let me just use Apple, for example. I think Apple thought the technology was ready for something they wanted to do and they couldn't pull it off. Now is it skill issue or a culture issue? Ultimately, I think if it was easy to implement this technology, if it was working up to par, we would get some company that would be able to do this. So again, like when you think about, you have to prioritize what you work on. You have to decide whether or not to go full steam ahead with this agentic move. How do you go from taking the research and development and deciding when it's time to put it into production?

[B]

I think we're convinced that's the future. And so that leads to the decision to invest and the confidence to invest you and then you roll it out to the extent it's ready to be rolled out. So some things you've seen us do with search are we start in labs, even with AI overviews, which has become a huge success, started as search generative experience in labs. And so that enables us to get started, get our feet wet and then we build confidence through that to actually know when it's ready for everyone. And so we have a, we also run experiments along the way, etc. So we, we don't have to make these as sort of yes or no, black or white sort of decisions. We're able to invest with a conviction because we know it's the future and then build it and then assess where we are in terms of how broadly we roll it out.

[A]

Okay, so Liz, AI mode, which is Google's way of giving you large language model search, has been rolled out to I think everybody in the United States.

[C]

Yep.

[A]

What are you seeing?

[C]

So it's still very early, it's only a few weeks in, but really happy with the adoption and that we're seeing people use it, we're getting positive feedback. We have a small set of people and growing that are really power users. We see them heavily engaging with it, using it several times a day. We're seeing them issue longer queries, experimenting in different ways. These more sort of harder questions, just asking more of what they want. We got a lot of work to do. We rolled it out last week to India. Also seeing the some great early reception in India across. But I think it's very exciting to just see how people start to use the product. We see people do more follow ups. Right. That's one of the things that we saw with AI overviews is people liked AI reviews but you couldn't really ask the next question. And sometimes these hard questions you have different refinements you want to ask. So that's been great to see how people are going on there. We got a lot of features coming ahead this week. I think it's this week we rolled out Gemini 2.5 Pro and deep search for our Pro and Ultra users in AI mode so that they can ask even harder questions going forward across. And a lot of exciting work coming up ahead.

[A]

Okay. And for our viewers and listeners, we're going to run this a couple weeks after the interview. So these are loose timelines that we're sharing here. But AI mode is a reinvention of search, so to speak. It takes the search from typical keyword searches to something somewhat more conversational. Do you think that the future of search is going to be AI mode style or is it going to be both? Because when I've thought about generative, generative AI chatgpt in the early days, I've always thought it's different use cases than traditional search. So how does Google think about it?

[C]

I think there's a large spectrum of questions that people ask. If all you wanted to do is get to big technology, you don't have to go have a conversation about it. You're just going to continue to type in the keyword, navigate to the site. Right. Other times you have harder tasks. Those are the ones that invite more of that conversational style. But sometimes it's not black and white. Somebody asks a question that they think is a quick question and then they get inspired and then they continue the conversation. We were coming up here and we were wondering how fast the elevator is up to the top. It's pretty fast is the short answer. Right. So we gave a response. Then I ran and went and read an article about how they said they changed the speed of it to actually allow more people to get up to the exploratory deck on one World Trade Center. So I learned about it, then I had another question to ask and so I think came in with a quick fact, but then it evolved into a longer conversation. And so I think the thing about search is it's a very Broad space. And so there's all different types of questions. And so I don't think use cases are all one or the other. I think we'll see people interact fluidly. I also don't think it's just text. Right. You said, is it quick or not? We've rolled out SearchLive in search labs with AI mode, we have Lens that's continued where people are doing more image searches. So I think what we'll see is that people will ask their questions in whatever way is natural. What is the way that you would like to ask that question? What's the most effective way? What's the most efficient way? And then we should make it easy for people to explore.

[A]

Well, then why are we going to have two different experiences? Is there a point where Google's technology gets smart enough that if I type in, let's say big technology, it's like, oh, you want the link, here's the link. Or if I type in a longer query, it should maybe have some understanding of the intent there and answer longer?

[C]

Yeah, I think we absolutely attempt, you know, continue to evolve, to try and adapt it to some degree. That is what the main search page has historically done. We've had image search which says, okay, if you want a few images, you get them on the main search page, but if you want to dive in deeper, you can go to image search. Right now, that's the way AI mode is, really is okay. If you just have a question, you shouldn't have to think about it. Just go to search, ask your question. If you want to dive in deeper, then you can engage with AI mode and we'll see how they both evolve. Does AI mode continue to grow? Does the main search take in more of AI mode capabilities and evolve? We'll see where they end up.

[A]

Where are you doing most of your searches?

[C]

I do them across both of them. It depends what type a lot of my.

[A]

You don't have a feeling of where the majority of your question queries are going, whether it's in the AI mode or the.

[C]

They're split. They're split pretty strongly. I don't know if it's 40, 60, 60, 40, but pretty down. It depends on the types of questions. Right. Right now, if I'm trying to find a restaurant to eat, I still find main search more effective for a lot of those questions. When I'm curious about a new topic and I'm exploring, I often find AI mode better. If I'm checking a sports score, I'm still more likely to use main search so it just depends on the question.

[B]

It's a hard question to ask us because we tend to use our products in odd ways almost to try to break the product or to sort of really see the edges of the product. And so I don't think our natural searching behavior is particularly normal.

[A]

Right. But I feel like we could learn a lot by asking the people at Google the way that they're gravitating. So, by the way, speaking of the information that's in AI mode, I'm actually curious, Nick, what you think about this. There's a growing field for AI SEO. We'll go to both of you on this one. I want to start with you, Nick. First of all, what do we call it? Is it geo, like Generative Engine optimization, or how do people call it within Google?

[B]

I think I heard geo for the first time today. Actually, I hadn't heard that.

[A]

We deeply need a better name before term like AI SEO. This industry won't keep running without proper jargon.

[B]

So I think that's right. I think it's a very natural question. How do people. Websites are clearly interested in how do I optimize for this experience. We are talking to websites, website owners, et cetera, publishers, et cetera, about that. Our general advice to websites is the way you optimize for generative AI is actually the same. Generative AI in search is similar to how you would optimize for search overall. What's particularly helpful in generative AI is deeper content, because in some cases, the AI response will be the first layer of the response. And what we hope is that the web links will enable the user to go deeper and really explore a topic in more detail. So that's a. But that would have applied for traditional search as well. But that is certainly an area that there's a lot of interest, and we're trying to help publishers through that experience.

[A]

The thing I've heard is that it's driving marketers nuts because they used to run by a certain playbook. Now they're not quite sure what to do. Maybe that's good. Liz, what do you think? Is that good that they're not able to game the system just yet?

[C]

I mean, I think what we've always tried to do with our guidelines is get publishers to focus less on how do they change the ranking and more on are you producing content that people want to read? Okay. And so that's what I would tell the marketers. Could you stop working on trying to figure how you focus on the system and really just is this content that you as a user would want to go read and spend five minutes on. And I think the more that we can surface that content, the more it becomes the case that people aren't focused on answering the first part of the question, but really thinking, what do they bring to the content? What's the thought in it, the perspective, the experience that they bring, and that's what they're talking about, then I think the better everyone will be. And so I think if marketers have to just focus on building content for people, that's awesome.

[A]

Have you ever heard the warning that Wikipedia gives people when they want a Wikipedia page? I don't know if they still do it, but in the past I'm pretty sure they would tell you you might not want a Wikipedia page because once something happens and you're involved in it, it could get on there and you have no control, and so be careful what you wish for. And I actually was speaking with a reputation management person who was like, I don't know what we're going to do with generative AI, because if someone types a person's name in, it's going to start becoming like that Wikipedia page, where if they did something bad, it's probably going to show up, whereas before they used to be able to, like, I don't know, push that down. What do you think about that? It's interesting, right? Changes things.

[C]

I think it's really interesting that we're going to get to a world right now where people can get more perspective often. Right. I think that's one of the nice things about AI overviews is that it's great that you have all of these different web results. But to the extent that the web results gave different perspective, people might have only clicked on one and sort of assumed that was the whole thing. But the AI reviews will give you actually multiple perspectives. Then you say, oh, there's a few different views on this. Let me read more about each of them. And so that opportunity to understand more holistically about a topic, I think is really exciting. And then you learn new things, and the new things can be all different flavors.

[A]

But.

[C]

But I think it's great for people to sort of gain more perspective on different things.

[A]

Yeah, I definitely think that's happened. I had an experience recently where there was a nasty, insulting word that was being used on Twitter, but I didn't know the meaning. So I typed it into Google and I think the first result was an Auburn fan. And then the second result was the explanation of that word, the one that I was looking for. And I was like, wow, it is interesting how AI overviews can be comprehensive like that and show both.

[B]

Yeah. And that's really the design intent is to give as much breadth of perspective or understanding of a topic as we can and then again, help people go deeper if they want to explore further.

[A]

So let's talk a little bit about what reinvention really means, because, Nick, you started your comments today just talking about how Google is in reinvention mode. I've said it's in reinvention mode. And the first thing you say is, do you reinvent search? Do you go from keywords to more natural language, for instance, and let people have conversations with search in AI mode versus just being like, okay, writing our own little computer language to get in. But I wonder, is this actually going to be the format? More and more we're seeing people build AI companions, therapists, lovers, and as long as they're generative and plugged into the Internet or the system, they might start asking them questions. So you were involved deeply with the Google Assistant back in the day. You still are overseeing it.

[B]

I do not.

[A]

You don't oversee it no longer. Okay, so strike that. You were. But you were. We spoke a lot back when you were involved with the assistant. Do you think that the way that we interact with the web information online becomes a different form factor than traditional? Type in the words and get the answers.

[B]

I think it will expand. That's my expectation. People are obviously using chatbots sort of more these days. In some ways, that's the evolution of assistance. Our bet, our belief is that people will continue to use search and grow their usage of search as well. There's probably a meaningful amount of Venn diagram overlap. Right, Right. I think it's unlikely that the future of search is sort of a companion that you're sort of building, maybe sort of an emotional relationship with. It's possible. But tbd, today what we see is people are using both. Right. And there's certainly people that are using chatbots. There are certainly still people using search. They go back and forth between them quite a bit. And so I think how exactly this evolves is still to be seen from a search point of view. Back to your reinvention point. It's critical that we continue to reinvent. Again, I mentioned this at the beginning. It's been the story of search. But we see these reinvention moments to really expand what you can do with search. That's what we're seeing with AI overviews. It's amazing to see with AI overviews. The increase in queries from AI overviews is amazing to see. We shared at Google I o that people are doing 10% more queries for the types of queries that trigger AI overviews. That's a lot. That's a meaningful change in user behavior. These are longer queries. These are more sort of who, what, when, where, why. Type queries. So we see them as. So we see each of these reinvention moments as these expansionary opportunities. So again, we lean into them pretty hard.

[A]

Okay, because I'll explain a interaction mode I have with search now that's very different than one I've ever had when I want to. When I'm on the go and I want to find things and you probably know where this is going, I just like pull out ChatGPT voice mode. There is a character that I speak with and I say, hey, can you help me figure it out? And instead of being that guy on the sidewalk who everybody hates, like typing and walking, now I'm just having a conversation with the Internet. So are we gonna end up like Liz, are you already brainstorming this idea of having like a Google search avatar that we speak with or a personality?

[C]

I don't think we've quite thought of it as an avatar, but we have actually rolled out SearchLive in labs that allows you to have more of a conversational experience. Ask the questions, get a response. We also bring up links so that if you get intrigued by something, you can continue to dig. I don't think it's necessarily at this point that we're thinking of it as pick your favorite personality. I think it's important that Google has more of a neutral and trustworthy one of it doesn't have a particular angle on things, but brings multiple perspectives. But the idea that it should be fluid in an audio form and doesn't have to be by text is absolutely something we see. And this is how we started to roll out SearchLive.

[B]

I probably do about half of my personal AI mode queries by voice. Maybe it's that I'm on the go, maybe it's that it's a much longer query. So it's going to be a bit annoying to type in on my phone. But I do expect that voice will, you know, voice is already a big part of search. I expect it'll be a growing part of search as well, particularly as queries get longer.

[A]

So it's interesting that you mentioned that Google has to be neutral. Do you either of you ever worry about the startups in the rear view mirror? Because they have much more flexibility. And I'll point out again, people are, some people are falling in love with their AI companions. I mean, if you have that sort of relationship with technology and you start asking it things that can search the web, that's latitude that a company like Replica might have that Google doesn't. So is that like an innovator's dilemma problem that you're worried about?

[B]

We, I mean, the biggest thing that we really try to make sure is that we maintain our users trust and we grow our users trust over time. So that's the thing that to the extent that anything holds us back, we don't want to make a mistake for our users, we don't want to violate the trust of our users. So that's always very front and center, front of mind for us.

[A]

I get it. So if Google breaks up with you, then you're going to have a very different feel of what Google is for the rest of your life.

[B]

Yeah, we'd be worried about something like that. We have experimented much more in labs and so having the labs environment has been important for us because we can try things that are a little bit more nascent. We started AI overviews in labs, we started AI mode in labs. That enables us to experiment with users who want to be more on the cutting edge. And so we can push further there for the core main search experience. We really try to make sure that things are well vetted before we bring to that experience. But the experience of going from labs, then to experiments and then to shipping has rapidly has also gotten really fast. We're shipping really fast these days, so we think that cycle works.

[A]

Can you explain to me how that happened? Because the world watched OpenAI take the lead with ChatGPT and myself included. We all said, where's Google? Where's Google? Where's Google? We knew you had a working large language model inside the company called Lamda because one of your engineers thought it was a real person or sentient. So everybody knew Google had the technology. And then it seemed like a switch flipped. And I mean, we go back to the spring where I O came and now there's IO now there's AI within everything in Google. Now maybe this was a perspective problem because Google had been talking about AI for many years. I've been to many of your developer conferences. It seems like the theme is AI.

[B]

It's been a theme for a while.

[A]

But I guess the difference is that it seemed like things were shipping or this urgency to get things in labs, get it tested. This boldness to say, all right, we have a format of search that might disrupt our current form of search, but we're just going to roll it out right next to regular search and see what happens. How did Google go from the company that was, it seemed like, to the outside, afraid of generative AI to one that embraces it?

[B]

I think the technology needed a lot of maturation right. Very early on. If you sort of rewind to those early days, the technology hallucinated quite a bit. Certainly within the context of search, factuality matters a lot. We don't people trust that when they search for something on Google, the results they get are highly accurate, they're high quality, et cetera. So that was a big area of concern for us. And the technology was truly nascent and had a lot of risks around it. So we invested aggressively. And Liz can talk more about this in grounding, in factuality, in getting to that point. And so that was really, I would say that was the real unlock for us was developing the technology and developing sort of everything around it that we could feel confident that was the thing that made sense to put in front of our users.

[A]

Liz, it's interesting. Obviously, Google had that incident where someone asked it how to make a pizza and it said, put glue on it or eat rocks or any number of weird things. And from your position, you go from that moment where I think maybe a reaction would be, let's clamp this down. We've certainly seen that with Bing, although it was a more extreme example. But when it tried to steal a New York Times columnist away from his wife, they said, we shouldn't do that anymore. So how do you then go from like, oh, that's a problem to even still because it's more risk. Roll this out as broadly as you have.

[C]

Yeah. So I think there's a couple of things that were important there. One, search has never been perfect. People will go and say, with AI featured snippets have had challenges. Knowledge graph is a problem. Web ranking isn't perfect. We're always on a relentless pursuit to make the quality even better. What we saw with that incident was both those queries were quite rare. We saw them only like 1 in 7 million, these types that people were facing. But we still really cared about the trust. And so we felt like we needed to take action on it. And so there's so much potential with the technology that we didn't think the right thing is clamped down. But the right thing isn't all either. Just let it be. So we put a lot of effort into Understanding what were the types of failures that were getting surfaced. One of the things that was different with generative AI is we were seeing new types of queries than we had previously seen. You mentioned eat rocks. People previously did not come to Google search and say how many rocks should I eat today or a day or any other form of how many rocks should I eat?

[A]

Because they already knew.

[C]

They already knew they needed a little affirmation eating those couple rocks, about those ones. Right? So if you went and sampled our queries and you looked for general things and we did extensive evals, we weren't seeing queries like that. Right. You can say that's a particular one. But more generally, these sort of false premise questions where it's not really a question that people are seeking out sort of cropped up in new ways. The other thing that cropped up in new ways was essentially how do you think about forum and UGC content? Right. The Glue on Pizza is a really thoughtful forum discussion that includes one sarcastic comment about Glue on Pizza that we picked up on there. So it wasn't enough to understand the site. It wasn't enough to understand the page. We had to get smarter about each section on a page, even if a page was trustworthy in that. And so when you look at the value the tech can do, we don't view it as oh well, there's some problems, therefore don't try. We view it as a challenge to figure out. How do you overcome? How do you handle the challenges that come up in the problems? And so people really put a lot of effort into figuring how to do that. And then we saw with our evals that we had really made progress on those problems and continue to grow. And we'll always make mistakes, we'll always continue to improve it. But we have quite a rigorous eval and testing process and feedback loop on it that helps guide us to ensure that we're doing the right thing by users.

[A]

Okay, so I want to talk about the future of the web and how publishers are going to be able to survive this moment. Because even if people are spending that 10% more time in AI mode, maybe they're not going to websites anymore. So let's do that right after the break. Material security is transforming how companies protect their most critical cloud assets like Google workspace and Microsoft 365. With modern purpose built security that actually works the way people do, incidents happen. The question is what you do next? Material covers the full lifecycle before, during and after an attack. So you detect issues early, contain them quickly, and recover cleanly. Because it is purpose built for Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, it sees what retrofitted tools miss. Risky sharing, unusual third party permissions and suspicious passwords, or two step verification prompts that hint at an account takeover. Lean teams get more done with intelligent automation, triage policy and response run at cloud speed without adding new hires. You also get layered defenses, advanced email protection against phishing and impersonation, and real time detection of misconfigurations and risky applications. See it in action at Material Security. That's Material Security. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Nick Fox, the SVP of knowledge and information at Google and Liz Reed, VP of Search at Google. Of course, one of the issues that we see in this moment is that the way that the information gets gets into the bot is it's kind of like a reverse Robin Hood where it takes from these poor publishers and sort of gives to the already rich Google and allows it to surface this information to users without sending the traffic back. You might dispute the characterization, but I think it's important to bring up Matthew Prince, the CEO of cloudflare, talked about how back in the day you would get two crawls per page and that would send one visit, two Google crawls, and eventually you would get one visit from those crawls. Now that number is something like 18 to 1 or even higher. People don't like going to the footnotes because they're starting to trust these bots more. That's what he says. So how is there a future for a healthy web if we keep moving this way?

[B]

So we love the web. We deeply believe in the web. That's good, that's good.

[A]

Same here.

[B]

The I think we share that Google's a company that's grown up on the web, right? And I don't think it's an overstatement to say that there's no company that cares more about the web than Google does. And so we care about this deeply. We think about this deeply and we have built both AI overviews and AI mode to be very web forward. It is a losing battle to fight users. There's a user change happening here. Users are looking for. It's clear that users are looking for a different kind of experience. If they're looking for a summary, we should not stand in the way of giving that user a summary. A product has to evolve and you have to evolve listening to your users. So that's not a choice. What is a choice is how we do it. So the approach that we've taken is to be very web forward. We have links throughout the experience. We try to very prominently feature content. We try to not recite content. When we do, you know, if we're referencing a specific publisher, a specific perspective, we try to say according to big technology or according to Bloomberg or whoever it might be that will be linkified. Right. And so to drive traffic. So that's our approach, that's our ethos. If you look holistically, traffic to the web from search has been stable over time. There's lots of reports of large decreases at any given point in time. There are sites that do well, there are sites that struggle. But if you look holistically across traffic broadly to the web from Google has been largely stable over time. So a lot of this is there is clearly a change happening. We're trying to do it in a very web forward and friendly way. That's our approach.

[C]

I think. Just one thing to add. We definitely understand that publishers and some folks are seeing less traffic, but what's also going on here as other traffic shifts? We're here doing a podcast. We're doing a podcast because people actually like podcasts these days, right. So you're seeing a shift, especially among younger users, for where are they going to information. So they're going more to podcasts, they're going more to forums, they're going more to social posts and less away from some of the traditional media. And so some of what people are assuming is about what's happening with AI is actually more about these shifts to new forms of media that people are seeking out, whereas the overall traffic is relatively stable.

[A]

Right. But there are publishers that have marked decreases when AI overviews started rolling out. I mean, just to give you one example, and I've given it on the show before, speaking with the publisher, World History Encyclopedia, who saw a 25% decrease in traffic like tied directly to AI overviews coming out. I don't think it's productive for us to have a back and forth over whether that was actually AI overviews related or not. He believes it is. Google might believe that there's these fluctuations. I guess the question is what do you do about it? Because that information is valuable to the web and to people. Forget the web, just to people in general and without ways to support themselves, we might not get that as much as. Could you envision a way where instead of someone from World History Encyclopedia, which is the number two history site or number two. Yeah, number two history site on the web after the Library of Congress, that they just write that content for the LLMs, and then it gets sort of ingested by, let's say, AI mode and then sorted to users. If that's the new way that people want to spend their time.

[B]

I think that's possible, but it's not the bet we're making. The bet we're making is that the value exchange that search has existed on for years is largely intact and it still makes sense. Websites make their content available for indexing, and as a result of that, Google sends traffic to those sites. Again, it will vary site by site. There's some sites that will do incredibly well. There are some sites that may struggle, but that's been the history over time. When we did mobile, a site that didn't adopt mobile maybe would have struggled, et cetera, or, sorry, when the world evolved to mobile, different sites dwell through that. But by and large, our view is, and the approach we're taking is that traffic still matters and that fundamentally users want to visit the web. Just giving an example the other day of I'm going to London, I was looking for a hotel. I was looking for a hotel near a park convenient to the airport, convenient to a certain train state. I sort of had all these details that I was looking for. AI mode gave me a nice response. It gave me some good recommendations. Ultimately, though, it's a hotel. I wanted to see a review of that hotel. So I clicked through the review site. Ultimately, I wanted to actually finally book that. So I clicked through the booking site. I think it's too reductive to say it's AI or the web. And our view is that it's AI and the web and those work together. And so that's our approach.

[A]

I think I might have been a little too snarky in the way I set this segment up, because if you think about it, Google's actually sending far more traffic per crawl than the others. I think Anthropic is up to something like 60,000 to 1 according to the Cloudflare data. And I always felt that, and I might make some enemies saying this, but I always felt that this publisher insistence that Google pays them for highlighting their information in Google News, for instance. So that headline in two sentences that to me felt overboard, like, this is a service where you're going to get highlighted, you allow the crawl and you're going to get a ton of traffic. Like, I'm a small independent publisher. I'd love to be in those Google News results. So I think that that was a little overboard, but this is a little different, I think, and maybe the traffic is consistent, but it just feels like, given this history example, you could spend your time reading about it on the website, or you could just read about the history event you want to in AI mode, or what I'm starting to do now, have a conversation with the AI voice. So is there ever some concern that, that the training data for the models will go away if the economics don't make sense for them? Or like, for instance, maybe these websites will go away if they're not, because even though Google's just indexing them and not like, responsible for their existence, like a lot of companies really did count on that Google traffic to stay alive.

[B]

It is for sure the risk if we get this wrong. Right. And it's a large part of the reason we care so much about it. In some ways, a search engine ceases to exist if there's no web to search over. So this is when I say that we love the web. Is a large part of the reason we love the web is it really is the ecosystem with which and on which Google search operates. And so we deeply care about it. We don't see signs that again, we see the traffic value. It's why we think it matters that the traffic is healthy and stable over time. If not, then we would start to get worried about that. Now, again, in pockets, maybe it's tougher to be a certain type of encyclopedia, given what these tools do. So again, there may be pockets where it's tougher, where it's different, but that's always been the story of the web. There have always been those, those that thrive and those that struggle. You have to lean into what the future is. Right? We have to evolve to where users are, where users are going, what the technology can do. And again, we just have to. Our approach is to do it in a way that enables the web to thrive through that moment.

[A]

So you're here in New York speaking with publishers. Are you both speaking publishers or is it.

[B]

We both had, we've, we both had a set of meetings with, with publishers.

[A]

All right, so how are those going? Let's go to you, Liz. Like, are they understanding this moment and what's, what's being discussed? I imagine it was about generative AI.

[C]

When we talked about search. And search includes. Search includes generative AI. I mean, I think, you know, many publishers these days are sort of trying to understand how is the future going to evolve. Right. I think the understanding, you know, as Nick mentioned, standing still is not going to work. It's not going to work for any of us. Search Included. But we all really do want to find a way to make this work for publishers, for media. And I think without that, we don't have a search engine, we don't have a product. And so we have to go find a way to make it effective. I think what we will see if we do it right is that really great, in depth, rich content that people bring. When people bring their perspective, their opinion, their experience, their expertise, that content will continue to thrive because people want to hear it. They're not giving their fashion advice to an AI bot. By and large, the people I know who are giving their fashion advice are not the people who are spending any time on fashion before, they're spending no time on fashion going forward. Right? But the rest of the folks who care about it, they still want to read that influencer, they still want to read the style magazine. Those folks who are really deeply interested in tech, they're going to still want to hear your podcast, right? Like you can talk to an AI bot about generative AI or we can hear your thoughts, right? And so we really want to continue to make that content thrive and come to the surface. And we spend a lot of time thinking about not just how are AI overviews or AI mode really high quality, but what does it mean to really make it web forward? How do we surface those links? What are the best links to do? How do we allow people to understand the value in continuing to go deep and progress? What will they get when they get to those websites? We started initially with more of a tray of web links and then we said, okay, that's great, we still believe in that, but we want to add links within particular sections because maybe you don't know which of the general sites, but you want to learn more about this one particular part. Then we started doing as Nick was referring to in some cases, according to big technology, according to somebody else, and linkifying that when we think it's really about their voice, could be according to a Reddit user or could be according to big technology. You'll think about the sentence that follows differently and you'll want to hear about it and read about it differently. So we're constantly have folks experimenting on the teams with how do we really take the beauty of the web and surface it in a way that allows people to dig in deeper on it?

[A]

How is search revenue continuing to grow the way that it is in this moment? I would imagine that as people use AI as it's still nascent in terms of the way that it sends traffic to publishers, still nascent the way that you monetize. But every time I'm looking at the numbers for the quarter or seeing them come in, I'm just like, huh, it doesn't seem like it should be possible to grow. I think it's like double digits search revenue somewhere in that area, in this moment, what's going on?

[B]

So there's a few interesting things that are all kind of happening at the same time. The first is queries continue to grow. And we've shared that on a year, on year basis, queries are growing. A lot of that is propelled by generative AI, right? And so generative AI has been in a lot of ways, fuel for growth. As users realize they can ask more questions, they can bring more questions to search. So that's a big part of it. The second part of it is AIO reviews fit into the existing search results page. The existing search results page has advertising on it as well. And so as we drive more queries, those queries monetize and we have an existing advertising model for that which also drives traffic to advertisers who are selling things or enable people to book hotels and things like that. So that's another major piece of it. The third piece is at the same time as all of that's happening on the results page itself, we're applying generative AI to our advertising products. And so in a lot of ways, the holy grail of advertising for the longest time has been an advertising come to us with, here's my site, here's how much I'm willing to spend, here's the ROI goal, I have, go do it. And we've been on that journey for a long period of time. Generative AI takes us an additional step towards that. So we can be better at matching ads to queries, we can be better at generating creatives, those types of things on behalf of our advertisers. The fourth thing is, as the queries get more specific and detailed, that leads to more valuable traffic to advertisers. So advertisers care about their conversion rate. They care about obviously their return on investment. The higher the conversion rate, the more valuable that click to the advertiser is. So the more that we're able to provide, enable users to specify their intent more specifically, the more that we're able to deliver a more qualified lead to the advertiser. So all of those kind of work together in a pretty symbiotic way.

[A]

And there have been people that have surmised that there's less impressions. So the CPC is up cost Per click. Is that wrong?

[B]

We don't share overall ad impression numbers. It's not one of our financial disclosures. We do share that pay clicks have grown over time as well as cpc. So both of those are growing over time.

[A]

Okay, how about shopping? I just think that shopping is going to be a real important, important new thing that happens through these bots. I've really gotten to the point where I won't buy anything unless I research it with a generative AI chatbot. What's the future of that going to look like? Liz, do you have any thoughts?

[C]

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a few things. I think generative AI makes shopping exciting in a number of different ways. One, you've got different types of shopping. You've got ones that are sort of more apparel or stylistic. You've got others that are. You're going to go buy an appliance, right? In the case of appliances, you want to do the research, but sometimes you want to understand about two or three different products, and those are not the two or three products that people have chosen to compare with. Somebody compares one product with another product. Someone compares this product. And so it's not really allowing you to do research on the subset of products you want to look at. But then with generative AI, you can, because you're no longer dependent on one webpage talking about the three products you want to compare. You get to specify. You also often have criteria that you care about that are maybe not really what people are spending the time researching on, but that information is buried somewhere on the web. And so I think that ability with something like an appliance to really gather the information across the web, understand holistically what it is, and then dig in deeper on the web is pretty exciting to see. On the apparel side, there's lots of times where you both want some level of like, okay, the dress has to fit my size. So I have a couple of structured data fields. But then beyond that, what I want is not really a structured data menu. It's something that's to describe. I want it to feel more classic. I want it to feel summery. I would describe it to a friend or to a sales person differently than you might have previously done with keyword ease. But generative AI lets you actually sort of start to describe what do you actually want. Right? And that kind of changes. I think what we can do with shopping going forward and really allow both in some cases, the more unique merchants, right? These merchants who are undiscovered, that have great products, your local Merchants, others that have ones to be found. Because now people can actually express something in a way that it narrows it down to where they shop. And so I think that's pretty exciting to see. I think we'll also see a lot of work around agents. We talked about some of the efforts at I O with the ability to decide that you want to track the price of something and so when it goes on sale, do that virtual try on was a highlight at I O. I am so I never know what the clothes are going to look like on me. Do I have to buy it, then do I have to return it? Returning it's like not fun for me. It's actually not fun for the merchant. It's not usually good for their business if they have a lot of returns. This idea that you could actually just see what it looks like and so have more confidence when you buy it, that you'll keep it, I think is really great. So I think there's a lot of opportunity with shopping in generative AI. I don't know if there's anything you want to add, Nick.

[B]

I think you got it.

[A]

Yeah, no, I definitely watch that space pretty closely. And probably another good emerging, well, not emerging business because Google shopping is a big business already, but I think probably an area for a lot of growth.

[C]

A lot of space for transformation.

[A]

Yeah. What about visual? I mean, I think Google started with Google Glass, went away, now everyone's building AR glasses. Is that going to be a format of search in the future?

[B]

I think so. I think it's a relatively nascent space.

[A]

But Lens is doing pretty well.

[C]

Lens is doing on fire.

[A]

Let's talk about that.

[B]

Lens is doing phenomenally well. The combination of lens and AI overviews is doubly on fire.

[A]

So Lens, as you point your photo at an item and you can ask it a question.

[B]

Yeah. And there's really two things that are taking off. One is you can point your camera at something and say, what is this? Or sort of here's my homework. Can you give me some help with my homework? These types of things. So it's doing very, very well with younger users too. The other piece of it is circle to search, which is. So that's the camera version of it. But what if I want to search something that's on my screen? So I might have homework assignment on my screen or I might see a bag that I like in, say an Instagram post or something like that ties back into shopping. Maybe I want to go buy that or I want to find out what it is or whatever it might be. And so that sort of combination of input is visual and then the AI summary or the AI response and then again with links to do I want to buy it? Do I want to go deeper? Is proven to be a really, really powerful combination.

[A]

Okay, I want to make a note about. Actually, let's talk. Can we talk about NotebookLM?

[B]

Sure.

[A]

How's that doing? So NotebookLM, by the way, folks, I'm sure many of our listeners know it. If you don't know it, you can drop a bunch of links in it. It will make sense. Do an FAQ timeline. It will create an audio podcast. By the way, Liz, to your point about people continuing to want to listen to this podcast, I hope so. I've had multiple people tell me that the voice, the male voice in these NotebookLM podcasts sounds like me.

[B]

Well, that's true.

[A]

Even still, we're growing, so it's not killing big technology.

[C]

They want your perspective, not just the sound of your voice. Right.

[A]

Yeah. Welcome to the deep dive. I think we're pretty close.

[B]

So how does that product take the product? So neither Liz nor I work on it, but the product is doing well. It's also doing quite well in the education use case. It's quite useful if you could upload your syllabus or a study guide or sort of point at your textbook, things like that, to actually go deeper in a topic. Obviously, the podcast version of it, you know, has really taken off. We've brought some of the podcast capabilities into search. Maybe you want to talk about the. How we've connected those back.

[C]

Yeah. So there's a. There's a couple of things within Discover. We've been playing around with Daily Digest, seeing. Okay, you get in the morning ones. Can you understand what some of the different stories are? We have a lab where we're experimenting with. If you come to search and you issue a query for those who opt in, can you get a short little podcast about the topic that you ask about? So it's great if you're on the go and you want to do this and you want to understand it. I think you have both the conversational one, like SearchLive or Gemini Live, but sometimes there's a different feel between you just asking questions versus hearing people discuss it. So we're constantly playing around with the general technology of taking content and turning it into a podcast is something that NotebookLM really piloted, but it's making its way into other Google products as relevant because it's just a. It's a fun way to learn about Something going forward.

[A]

Okay. As we come close to an end here, I wanted to ask some bigger picture questions. I think there's like, there's two views of how this is going. Like, there's one curve about that people think about with generative AI that we've had great advances for a while and now it's leveling off. And there's another curve that people think about. We're like, all right, this is cool, but we're at the beginning of an exponential and it's about to get crazy. Personally, where do you both land on that?

[B]

I can go first.

[A]

Go for it.

[B]

Do you want to go first?

[C]

No, go ahead.

[B]

I believe it's closer to the ladder. I think. I think it's easy to underestimate where our technology is when you're in it. But actually, the way I see it sort of the most is there are, at least in the point of view of search, there are so many questions that we have in our heads that we're not asking. The amount of information that people are interested in would be interested to consume is so much more vast than what people do. We've said this before. One of the great things about our mission is that at any given point in time, we're barely scratching the surface of what that mission can be. I said this earlier. The opportunity that generative AI technology brings for a product like search is massively vast. And I think we're really, really early on in it.

[A]

How do you think, Liz?

[C]

I'd also agree it's very early. I think one thing in particular is the models are getting much better at reasoning and they're also getting much better at tool use. LLMs are great at a set of things, they're not great at everything. We have great tools that exist in the world for other things. But if you can now teach an LLM to use tools, what does that now enable? And to use multiple tools across. You take something like you have a Trivia about finance. LLMs are great about reasoning through it, but you don't want them to make up the number. They're not going to know what the latest financial data are. But if they can go query a database we have of real time finance data, real time sports data, and then pull it together and ask the question, then you can ask much more interesting questions than you could previously ask on search. But they're grounded in actual data, they're not just made up numbers. And so I think particularly a bunch of the reasoning, the tool use, the agentic capabilities, they will really unlock a lot and then just to double down on Nick's point, whether or not somebody asks a question isn't just a question about whether or not they had a question. It's whether or not it was worth their time.

[A]

Right?

[C]

Right. And so people do that question, right? You were curious about the flower, but if you had to figure out how to describe the flower in words, no way. So you didn't ask the thing. Okay. But then now you can take a picture of it and now you ask the question. Right. It wasn't like suddenly people became curious about what the flower was, or your plant is dying. And now people take a picture and say, why is it dying? How do I help it? They cared about whether their plant was dying. They just didn't know what to do about it. Right. And so there's a lot of possibility to open up when you just lower the barrier to information access. Lower the barrier to information understanding. The last thing I think that's kind of still very underexplored is transforming content. We talked about the podcasts from NotebookLM, but just this ability to take content in one form and transform it into another without so much work, I think is both exciting from a search perspective because people learn differently. People are in different environments where they can get it. But also from a creator perspective, you're creating content. Do you have to create the content in every single form, or can you create the content in a podcast and easily turn it into a nice article and then easily turn it into short clips of video? And so I think there's a lot of possibility there around that sense of, like, remixing content in a way that's interesting.

[A]

Very interesting. So you've both been at Google for 22 years. Did you start. Were you in the same orientation with those? Did they have the spinning hats?

[B]

We were on different coasts.

[C]

I was in New York.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

I spent 10 years in New York.

[A]

All right.

[B]

I was in Mountain View.

[A]

Okay. It's a long time. At Google. Where does this era rank on the.

[C]

Level of most exciting?

[A]

But I want to know about, like, so obviously you've seen shift from desktop to mobile. You've probably seen, like, the cloud shift as well. Shift from portals to search. Where is this the number one shift, like, the most intense shift, or is this like, somewhere in the middle?

[B]

I think it is the most. There's always recency bias and things like this. To me, it feels like Google when I started, there's a strong feeling of the sky's the limit. There's a strong feeling of opportunity paired with the ability to we are shipping in search at a pace. It's such a fast pace, I can't even remember. And that's fun because the technology is fundamentally enabling us to do things that we might have only dreamed about doing before. And so, again, we don't see these things as scary. And so it's not.

[A]

I didn't ask. Which is not the number one fearful moment.

[B]

It's just a really exciting and fun time.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

I think in search in particular, there have been many technology shifts, but this is a technology shift at the heart of what search is about. Understanding information and ability to organize. When you go back to our mission, organizing information, making it useful, making it universally accessible. So it's a technology shift that's right at the root of that. And so that makes it exciting. And I think we have a lot of folks in search that have been in search for quite a long time, and they have been trying their ideas for many years. Right. You know, sometimes people think, oh, when we ship it, it's the first time we thought of it. No, actually, oftentimes we thought of the idea 15 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago, you tried, it didn't work. You tried, it didn't work, or you tried, and it was more incremental. You can make a little bit of progress. Suddenly we're at a time where you try those ideas and you're like, wow, I can probably do them this time, right? Oh, I can not just do small tweaks and make a little bit of progress. I can make big jumps. And that's. That's really exciting to people because you work hard, you're building a product for multiple billions of people, which is just a daunting thing at its heart. Now you're like, wow, I can bring this to life for billions of people. And that makes it really exciting.

[A]

I have two more questions. Can we just lightning round through them both?

[B]

Let's do it.

[A]

I asked Sergey when we were at I O what the web looks like in 10 years, and he's like, I'm not even going to begin to attempt what does the web look like in five years.

[C]

It's a long time. Right now you've got people guessing AGI and ii, right. I think if we do our job right, the web feels like it is filled with really rich and interesting content where people, where creators feel like it's one of the most thriving times where they can bring their perspective, where anyone can come and share their content and be discovered and connect with people. I think it is probably even more Multimodal, multi format, like, I would certainly expect video to continue to grow. I would certainly expect audio and not just text with some images to grow. So I think you'll see more and more of different types of content that people do. But I think if we all collectively, but certainly Google search, which has a key role, do our job right, then you see content really thriving.

[B]

The thing I'd add is I think the web will be much bigger. I think the other thing that we haven't talked much about, I think this moment will also lower the barrier for creation of content. And we see that happening a lot. We see that with things like VO3, but I think the barrier for creation of content, multimodal, but as text as well, will come down quite a bit. I think that will enable an explosion of the creation of content as well.

[A]

Okay, here's my last one. We've talked about this moment of reinvention for Google. We've talked about some of the speed bumps that you've put in for yourself or these moments where you don't want to go too far because you might lose user trust. And you've both said that we're at the beginning of an exponential. So do you ever worry that even though you're in reinvention mode and changing a lot, that you're not changing fast enough to get ahead of this?

[B]

My view is, I mean, I think you always worry about that, right? Like, I think you always worry, are you prioritizing the right things? Are you doing the right things? Are you doing it fast enough? So for sure, speed matters. It's one of the things that Liz, is we've sort of collectively been emphasizing with the teams. Again, we take this responsibility very, very seriously that we have. And so, so I think we need to build quickly, I think we need to experiment quickly. And then we need to make sure that we're shipping to the billions of users who use Google when things are ready. And so that's the approach we need to take. Does that enable us to go fast enough? I think that's a good question. But we're not willing to sacrifice the trust of our users and we take the responsibility of those users seriously. So we do it as quickly as is reasonable.

[A]

Liz, take us home.

[C]

I think I am probably both, personality wise, a worry wart and part of my job is to always obsess with that question. Are you doing enough? How can you go faster without breaking? Not at the expense of trust, but can you go faster? Can you do a better job? Can you raise the bar I spend a lot of time with my team just always asking the question, how can we be more effective? And I think being obsessed with, like, the alternative of not worrying is being complacent, and so I don't want to be complacent. I'd rather worry.

[A]

All right. And focus on Liz and Nick. It was great speaking with you. I've appreciated our conversations through the years.

[B]

And I hope to continue them. Thank you.

[C]

We hope to be back.

[A]

Oh, you will.

[B]

As long as you want to.

[A]

Okay, thank you, everybody, for listening, and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.