Google it (while you still can)

TL;DR: This year, instead of focusing on engineering benchmarking or tools, Google unveiled a flood of AI-powered consumer features and product integrations at its annual developer conference. The two biggest announcements: The company is reinventing Search into an AI-first interface and wants to make OpenClaw-style agents mainstream.

Let me google that for you: Google is retooling its core product before someone else beats it to the punch. The updated search box is changing (for the first time in 25 years) and will now support longer questions, follow-up conversations, and attachments like photos, videos, documents, and Chrome tabs. And it can dispatch agents to scan the web for you. (Here’s what the new Search will look like.) The goal: Search will become more like a personal assistant—planning your trips, helping you shop, creating schedules, and giving summaries and ongoing updates. Goodbye, blue links. We hardly knew ye.

Agents for all: Google also wants to make you use an AI agent, whether you like it or not. So far, agent adoption has been shaky. While Silicon Valley has been deep in OpenClaw, it hasn't quite hit, say, Toledo, and getting agents running has required either technical know-how or a lot of patience.

Besides agentic integration into the new Search, Google also announced Gemini Spark, a 24/7 personal agent running on Google's cloud across Gmail, Chrome, and Workspace, as well as Daily Brief, an agent that creates a morning digest. Spark will hit Google AI Ultra and some business users in beta next week. As Platformer observed, Google probably hopes this is its ChatGPT moment for agents. Or, as one headline put it, “If Google can’t make AI agents useful, maybe no one can.”

Also announced: Gemini models for the “tokenmaxxing hangover” era, a new image-generating app, smart glasses designed with very fashionable partners (but, please, don’t call them smart glasses). Oh, and YouTube’s search is also getting an overhaul. While Google did hit consumers with a lot, some pointed out the company may also have a branding problem. “Let me Gemini, Flash, Omni, Nano Banana, Spark, or Flow that for you” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Bottom line: As Google stares down an existential threat to its market share in the AI era, the company’s strategy is to weave the technology into all of the products consumers already use. —AC