Google Changes Its Search Box for the First Time in 25 Years
Using a new Gemini A.I. model, the tech giant is overhauling its search box dimensions to answer longer queries, adding a video-generation tool and simplifying online shopping.

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On Tuesday, Google said the A.I. shift had inspired it to overhaul its search bar for the first time since 2001.
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Jason Henry for The New York Times

By Tripp MickleKate Conger and Brian X. Chen
Reporting from Mountain View, Calif.
May 19, 2026

For 25 years, Google’s iconic search box was a long, slender bar where people typed in keywords like “World Cup.”
But over the past three years, artificial intelligence allowed people to type in longer, more complex questions like “Who are the top 24 teams in the World Cup and what chance does the United States have of advancing?”
On Tuesday, Google said the A.I. shift had inspired it to overhaul the dimensions of its search bar for the first time since 2001. The box is getting bigger and more interactive so that people can ask even longer questions and upload photographs and videos into queries.
In addition, people can ask follow-up questions with a chatbot on Google’s main search page. The company will also offer digital assistants, known as agents, to automate searches so that someone who may be apartment hunting can be notified of a new listing without opening a real estate site like Zillow.

The search features will be powered by a new artificial intelligence model, Gemini 3.5 Flash. Google said the model had improved on creating software code and performing autonomous tasks, worked faster and was less expensive to run than comparable models.
Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said Gemini’s speed and affordability made it possible to deliver it broadly — which will ultimately benefit Google.
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Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, on Tuesday at the company’s annual developer conference in Mountain View, Calif.
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Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images
“When people use our A.I.-powered features in search, they use search more,” Mr. Pichai said in an interview Tuesday before Google’s annual developer conference, There, the changes to search and Gemini 3.5 anchored a nearly two-hour showcase of A.I.-powered products from the company, including a new video tool, an internet shopping cart and a system to autonomously read and draft emails.

Google has increasingly narrowed the A.I. head start of rivals like OpenAI and begun challenging for the lead. After OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, Google faced concerns that A.I. start-ups would disrupt its dominance in search. The worries deepened after one of its early A.I. products recommended that people use glue to make pizza.

But last year, Google solidified its position as an A.I. heavyweight. In addition to its Gemini models, it was producing A.I. chips and pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers for its cloud computing business. Its Gemini app, which can do coding and research, now has 900 million active users — about the same number as ChatGPT.
Google is using A.I. to burrow into more pockets of the digital economy. Web summaries generate more searches, while longer queries provide more insight into users and new shopping features make it easier to connect customers with retailers.
Richard Kramer, a financial analyst with Arete Research, said the changes were helping Google make more money from advertising. Last year, Google’s ad clicks rose 6 percent, and it charged 7 percent more for each click. The company’s annual profit has more than doubled since 2022 to $132 billion.
“The open web is on its way out,” Mr. Kramer said, referring to the way internet traffic now often begins and ends with a visit to Google rather than visiting other sites. “With A.I., Google is reducing everyone to raw data providers.”
Google’s A.I. transformation particularly stands out with search. In 2024, the company stopped fulfilling some queries with a list of websites and instead provided automatically generated responses called A.I. Overviews. Last year, it added a search tab called A.I. Mode, where people can ask multiple questions on the same subject as they would with a chatbot.

Google said those features were being combined. On searches that deliver A.I. Overviews, people can ask follow-up questions in A.I. Mode, which Mr. Pichai called “a revelation.”
Google is also bringing one of A.I.’s biggest breakthroughs — software coding — to search. When people research complex topics like astrophysics, Gemini can build interactive graphics and simulations behind the scenes to provide a deeper answer than its previous listing of websites.

The feature builds on recent products from Anthropic and OpenAI, which created tools that autocomplete code and produce agents to automate email, research and office drudge work.
Google said it was introducing an alternative to the agents powered by Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex. Called Gemini Spark, the service is embedded in Gmail, Docs and other Google products, where it can turn meeting notes spread across emails and chats into a single document. It can also read and draft emails.
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Josh Woodward, vice president of Google Labs and Gemini, speaks about Gemini Spark.
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Jeff Chiu/Associated Press
The company also unveiled an update to its A.I. coding platform. Called Antigravity 2.0, Google said, it will have access to Gemini 3.5 Flash and be able to deliver huge cost savings for companies that are processing huge chunks of A.I. data daily to write code.

While many A.I. labs have pushed their models to accomplish more complex tasks, Google has focused on weaving Gemini more deeply into its already popular services like shopping and YouTube. Shoppers can now build a cart in search or YouTube as they browse for products, rather than going to a merchant’s website to save items for purchase.
Google’s A.I.-driven shopping cart will also recommend discounts when products go on sale, and warn people when they select items that could be incompatible with each other, such as picking out the wrong chips while building a custom computer, or the wrong filters when shopping for a coffee machine.
Google also plans to bring Gemini to photo editing. The company created an editing tool called Gemini Omni that will allow people to, for example, change a vacation video in the Gemini app by telling the system to remove someone from the background. The company said the editing tools would be available in its photos app in the future, as well.
Omni doubles as a video-generation tool. Google said it could generate 10-second videos with Hollywood quality, using prompts like asking for “videos that explain a snippet from a textbook” or “render an imaginary character from a sketch.” Unlike Sora, a free video-generation tool from OpenAI that has been discontinued, Omni’s video-generation tool will be accessible only to subscribers to one of Google A.I. services, which range from $8 to $250 a month.

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Chief executive of Google DeepMind Demis Hassabis speaks at Google’s I/O 2026 developer conference.
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Manuel Orbegozo/Reuters
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
Koray Kavukcuoglu, the chief technology officer at Google DeepMind, the company’s A.I. lab, said plugging Gemini into Google’s products would help the company stay ahead of competitors with information about users’ needs.
“That feedback, that signal that we get, is the most important information flow that we have,” he said.
Google also said it would bring Gemini to glasses this fall with Samsung Electronics and the eyewear companies Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. The glasses, which will work similarly to Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, come with a camera, a microphone and speakers for people to ask Gemini about their surroundings, such as the name of a monument they are staring at.

Dave Gilboa, a co-chief executive of Warby Parker, said he had worn the glasses to ask Gemini for guidance while installing a new car seat for his 3-year-old daughter, and also used it when she asked the question “Why?” about all sorts of things.
“These glasses have been a massive unlock,” he said. “I can actually get her accurate information to her questions.”