The future of Google is a search box that does everything

Last year, after watching Google’s I/O keynote, I wrote that it felt like Google’s future was Google googling. After watching this year’s I/O keynote on Tuesday, I don’t think Google just wants to google for you — I think it wants to do everything for you, all from a search box.

Take the trusty Google search bar itself, something Google is generally hesitant to update, which is getting some updates. It will “dynamically” expand as you type longer queries. It will offer “AI-powered suggestions” that Google claims will “go beyond autocomplete,” which could cause you to fill in the blanks of a search in a way you didn’t intend but may or may not be helpful.

Or how about what Google actually shows in Search results? From AI Overviews you can keep asking questions in AI Mode, which generates a custom page with an AI-generated summary of what you’re searching about instead of showing you a traditional list of links. Search results are also going to be even more personalized because Google will be able to generate custom UI for you, including generating things like interactive visuals and graphs right within your search results page. You’re also going to be able to ask Google, right from the search bar, to make “information agents” that can keep track of things you care about — like new sneaker drops or apartment listings — making the search bar a kind of AI-infused Google Alert.

Gemini is getting a bunch of upgrades and features, too. It can send you a “Daily Brief” that tells you about your day based on information from across your Google apps, like Gmail and Google Calendar. You can create your own custom Google-powered agents thanks to a feature called Gemini Spark, which could have a leg up on agents like OpenClaw because it’s a first-party offering from Google. The company has also been recently making a big kerfuffle about Personal Intelligence, which pulls in context from your other Google apps that helps inform your responses from Gemini.

In Workspace, Google wants you to just blab at tools like Gmail and Docs and Keep, and the apps will help with things like parsing your inbox, drafting a document, or generating to-do lists. For shopping, the new Universal Cart will keep track of things you want to buy in apps like Search, Gemini, Gmail, and YouTube — and let you check out using Google’s payment infrastructure. And speaking of YouTube, the company is testing an AI Mode-like experience there, too, where it will put together a page of search results instead of just showing you a list of things to watch.

There’s more, too — with the new Gemini Omni models, you’ll be able to create a video using things like other videos, other images, and audio as prompts. Down the line, you’ll be able to generate other media as well; the family of models is meant to be able to “create anything.”

I could go on; there was a lot announced at I/O. But what I’m trying to get at here is that Google isn’t just showing you the location of information anymore. Through its various search boxes, it’s now just answering questions for you in a way that it thinks is most helpful. In the most charitable view: If it’s done well and accurately, this all could be very useful. But that means it has to be done well and accurately, and that’s an extremely high bar to clear, especially with complex search queries or questions about sensitive data like my years of emails in Gmail.

It’s not hard to imagine a future where, someday, Google just makes everything happen in one universal search box. No more hopping between Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, Gemini — my gut is that Google’s current end state is that you just type anything you’re looking for into an Ask Google box, and Google finds a way to make it happen and surface it for you in a personalized way.

Assuming that’s the case, that’s not something I want. The fun of the internet is actually doing the work to find stuff, even if it’s sometimes frustrating, difficult, or time-consuming. Sure, the pitch for talking to Gmail to get help finding things in my inbox seems handy, but I’ve also spent years honing my own email management system — one that would work whether I used Gmail or not. It also works great for me, I think we should all have to go through the motions of figuring out the systems across all of our digital lives that work best for us instead of just relying on Google to figure it all out from one universal search box.

Google doing everything also means a lot of the web that Google relies on collapses under it. If Google Search doesn’t send traffic to publishers or websites who need visitors to make money — something that is already happening at a rapid rate, thanks Google Zero! — what will Search learn from, and where will it point people to? If YouTube’s AI Mode-like feature stops people from browsing videos, how will creators who lose their audience be able to support themselves to make more videos? Google may not care — it increasingly seems to just want a search bar that can do it all, no matter the cost.