Although any informed observer would have easily predicted that the future of search is AI, only Google insiders knew how Google would spin its AI innovations within its search business.

However, thanks to some exciting highlights from Google's I/O 2023 event, we now have some clue on how Google is going to tether its AI technologies to one of its biggest money spinners—Google Search. Here are three excellent AI features that are coming to Google Search.

1. AI-Powered Snapshots

Search generative experience -- AI snapshot in google search

AI-powered snapshots or AI snapshots—whatever you wish to call them—are AI-generated text snippets. Put simply, they're Bard-style responses to your Google Search queries.

When you search on Google, you'll typically see three primary things on the result pages. A standard list of links to explore, some ads related to your query, and in some cases, a Google featured snippet that attempts to answer your question by showing short excerpts from a relevant article. AI snapshots will be like an advanced version of featured snippets powered by several of Google's large language models.

However, unlike the featured snippets feature, AI snapshots aren't going to pull content from a single source. Content displayed within the AI snapshot panel would synthesize results from multiple trusted web sources to provide the best possible result for your query.

If you're still struggling with picturing the feature, think of it as Google's Bard AI slapped on top of Google search result pages. It would be one of the first things you see on a result page, even before the links you typically click through to other websites. AI snapshots will help to simplify otherwise multistage searches associated with complex queries.

Let's say you wanted to search "What are the best cities in the United States where I can find vegetarian food close to ferry terminals as well as ferries accessible to people with disabilities." Good luck getting Google to answer that. Your best bet would be to break those queries into multiple parts and research each component one after the other, a rather time-consuming task.

However, Google's enormous LLMs already have the information about all the components of that search. So, instead of going through multiple stages to get what you want, AI snapshots would do the job for you in split seconds. For the first time in Google Search, you'd be able to perform very complex queries while confidently expecting good results.

Search generative experience -- conversational mode prompt box

Building on AI snapshots is a new conversational mode. Conversational mode, in its simplest form, is a Bard-like interface that is preloaded with the context of your search and invoked whenever you want to explore more about the information you see on the AI snapshot panel. To invoke conversation mode, you'll need to tap Ask a follow up at the bottom of the AI-powered snapshot panel.

For instance, if your original search was "good bikes for a five-mile commute with hills," and AI snapshots pulled up a wide range of results. You can tap Ask a follow up and then use a prompt like "red bikes" to narrow down your AI-generated results to good bikes for a five-mile commute with hills that are red.

You can even go further with a prompt like "made in the USA," and the AI will further narrow down the results to "good US-made bikes for a five-mile commute with hills that are red." This represents a compelling way to filter search results with precision.

3. AI-Assisted Shopping

AI-assisted shopping on -- Search generative experience

One other exciting AI search feature is AI-assisted shopping. We are unsure whether Google would prefer to call it a more fancy name, but let's stick with that for now. At its core, AI-assisted shopping is simply Google shopping plus AI filtering.

It's not exactly a standalone feature. Instead, it is intricately woven into the AI snapshot panel and comes up whenever you make queries that are related to shopping.

How does it work? It helps you narrow down products of interest by using follow-up prompts in the conversational mode prompt box. So, if you search for "blue t-shirts for kids" on Google and click through to the conversational mode, you can use prompts like "under $30" or "with discounts" to induce AI-powered filtering of product listings.

While all these features have been announced, Google is yet to roll it out to the public. If you'd love to be one of the first to try them out once Google begins a controlled roll-out, here's how to access Google's AI-powered search features.

Artificial Intelligence is undoubtedly making aggressive inroads into the world of online search. Microsoft has given its Bing Search a proverbial shot in the arm, seeing improved traffic after introducing AI features to its search business. There are plenty of other ways that companies are using generative AI search as well.