Google reportedly developing AI-powered search engine

With rapidly expanding AI competition from Microsoft and OpenAI, Google's search engine is lagging behind. The company is racing to compete with a new AI-powered search engine, The New York Times reported.

Though still in its early stages of development, the search engine might offer hopes of a “far more personalized experience”.

The company is also developing other new AI features for its existing search engine under Codename 'Magi'.

Some of the features the rumoured search engine will feature include a chatbot that can answer software engineering questions and generate code snipPets. Another feature would allow users to search for music through chatbot conversation. The Times, reports that Google has already assigned 160 employees to the project.

A Chrome feature dubbed 'Searchalong' would enable the chatbot to scan the webpage and offer contextual information. 'GIFI' and 'Tivoli Tutor' would be able to prompt Google Image Search to generate images and converse with a chatbot to learn a new language.

The company is expected to announce Magi next month, first launching to one million people in the US and then expanding to 30 million more users at the end of the year.

“We’ve been bringing AI to Google Search for years to not only dramatically improve the quality of our results, but also introduce entirely new ways to search, such as Lens and multisearch,” says Google spokesperson when talking to Engadget. “We’ve done so in a responsible and helpful way that maintains the high bar we set for delivering quality information. Not every brainstorm deck or product idea leads to a launch, but as we’ve said before, we’re excited about bringing new AI-powered features to Search, and will share more details soon.”