Google has announced a series of updates to Search for 2025, powered by Gemini 2.0, the company’s latest AI model.
One of the most notable updates is the enhancement of AI Overviews.
CEO Sundar Pichai notes:
“Our AI Overviews now reach 1 billion people, enabling them to ask entirely new types of questions — quickly becoming one of our most popular Search features ever.”
With Gemini 2.0, AI overviews will soon handle complex topics and multi-step questions, including advanced math, multimodal queries, and coding.
Pichai explained:
“We’re bringing the advanced reasoning capabilities of Gemini 2.0 to AI Overviews to tackle more complex topics and multi-step questions, including advanced math equations, multimodal queries and coding.”
Google is testing these updates and plans to roll out the improved AI Overviews in early 2025, with plans to expand to more countries and languages within the next year.
Gemini 2.0, mainly the Gemini 2.0 Flash model, is key to the recent Search updates.
As described by Google DeepMind’s leadership:
“2.0 Flash even outperforms 1.5 Pro on key benchmarks, at twice the speed.”
This model improves performance and can handle different types of inputs and outputs.
The announcement states:
“In addition to supporting multimodal inputs like images, video and audio, 2.0 Flash now supports multimodal output like natively generated images mixed with text and steerable text-to-speech (TTS) multilingual audio.”
Additionally, Gemini 2.0 Flash can use tools like Google Search and run code to access user-defined functions from other sources.
Google is developing new features for Search, including Project Mariner, which aims to improve user interaction with agents in web browsers.
The company describes it as:
“… an early research prototype built with Gemini 2.0 that explores the future of human-agent interaction, starting with your browser.”
Integrating Gemini 2.0 into Google Search could be a key step in improving users’ experience with AI overviews.
The success of these updates will depend on how well Google implements them while maintaining safety and responsibility.
As the updates roll out, we will see how users respond and whether these changes enhance the search experience.