Google Magi: AI-powered visualized & personalized “search”
AI competitiveness is always at an all-time high, with today's businesses finding new paths to dominance, forcing Google to speed up its battle vs Microsoft's Bing search. Since the debut of Microsoft Bing with OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google fell behind in the competition, which introduced Google Bard.
However, introducing Bard was only the first step in demonstrating its entry. Google was covertly working on another project that propelled it to the forefront of the AI race by replying to opponents with a now-operational project called "Magi" (1).
Google Magi could potentially revolutionize the search engine world, but it would be different from Brad, highlighting Google's advancement in AI warfare. Tech Behemoth Google's annual I/O developer conference will occur in three days on May 10 (2).
With the Magi project, Google aims to redesign its search engine to make it more visually appealing, personalized, and an appetizer for AI and humans as it concentrates on addressing young AI-seeking minds globally and moving away from the old "10 blue links" structure.
This strategy also includes including more human voices in search engine results. It also intends to make it more interactive and conversational, allowing users to have natural language conversations with search engines.
Understanding Google's Project Magi
Google Magi is an AI-powered project founded upon Google's search. This was in response to Samsung's oblique threat to Google to focus on developing and including more AI features in its search engine, similar to steady Microsoft AI updates.
According to a New York Times report (3), several engineers, designers, innovators, and executives are working on this software in "sprint rooms," where they have been tuning and testing the latest technology, which is supposed to deliver a more personalized search output.
The new search engine is intended to explain what individuals want to know based on their search queries in a more evident and personalized way. It is still in its early stages of development, with approximately 160 people working on it.
Google may make the Magi project accessible globally to just a handful of people during the company's annual Google i/O developers conference in May. The company's spokesman also expressed optimism about adding new AI-powered features to the search engine and stated that more information would be shared shortly.
AI Wars: Google v Microsoft
It happened when news broke that Samsung was considering replacing Google with Microsoft's Bing as the default search engine for its products, which sent waves of shock throughout employees at Google and a sense of chaos.
The Samsung contract is worth $3 billion in annual revenue, whereas a similar Apple contract worth $20 billion is due for renewal this year, which pressurized it changes its approach and focus to AI. However, the threat presented by AI-powered competitors such as the new Bing has emerged as the most severe threat to Google's search business so far.
To add a little spice to Samsung's threat, the company replaced Google with Bing as the default search engine in several product lines. It clicked a larger "panic" button on its pre-developed threat against Google, giving its staff several restless nights.
However, these hot conditions prompted Google to spread its wings and explore more AI. It is now preparing to launch and integrate its new project Google Magi, which will have all-new search results that are more visualized, personalized, and a direct competitor to Bing.
Google also asked some of its employees to try Magi features and pushed them to ask follow-up questions to test the search's capacity to sustain a conversation. According to reports, Google may reveal these features to the public at the recent developer conference or later in May.
It has also been suggested that Google intends to initially give the tools to one million users to test before gradually expanding to up to 30 million by the end of 2023. It also appears that some of its functions are already being implemented in the United States.
The primary feature of Google's latest AI Magi will be that it breaks the standard way it displays search results. The AI chatbot-like Magi promises to change how consumers acquire results by aesthetically improving and personalizing it with human-friendly responses.
If the Magi project went as intended and Google, it might be a game changer by revealing direct competition to Bing and OpenAI. It could also potentially result in certain changes to Samsung's contract.