Pod Insights Big Technology Podcast Google's Head Of Search On Its Big AI Bet — With Liz Reid About this episode Elizabeth Reid is Google's VP of Search and a 20-plus year veteran of the company. Reid joins Big Technology to discuss Google's major AI push and how this new era of computing is transforming its product and business. Tune in to hear about AI-organized search results, the growth of Google Lens, and how AI is changing the way people interact with search. We also cover the potential impact on publishers, Google's approach to responsible AI deployment, and the future of AR technology. Hit play for an insider's look at how the world's largest search engine is evolving in the age of AI.
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0:00 Alex Kantrowitz? Google's head of search joins us to talk about the company's major AI push and how this new era of computing is transforming its product and business. That's coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put Agentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large scale Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade offs, and lessons along the way.
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1:14 Alex Kantrowitz? Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We have a great show for you today because Liz Reid, the VP of Search at Google, is here to share a number of announcements that Google is making in terms of the way that it's bringing AI even deeper into search. We're going to talk about all that and plenty more. Liz, great to see you. Welcome to the show.
1:37 Speaker 01 Thank you. Thanks for having me on.
1:38 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay, so we're going to talk about all your announcements, including big announcements on Google Lens and the way that we're personalizing or you're personalizing Google search more with artificial intelligence, along with some potential ad news coming to Google's AI overviews. That's all coming. But first, let's get this out of the way. Why did Google tell us to eat rocks?
1:58 Speaker 01 If you want the detail of that one, The Onion published a story and that story was mirrored on a geology site that is generally a pretty high trusted source.
2:09 Speaker 01 For that, for high quality information about geology. And, you know, we went and tried to answer the question and found this, right? And clearly a mistake and clearly more work to do. While we have protections on things like satire, which we detected on something like the onion. We didn't actually realize it was on this article. I think one of the things that we generally focus on is ensuring that we really do have high quality and helpful information. And that's something we put a lot of work into and a lot of testing, but we're not perfect. And there are certain classes of queries that we were not, um, not seen as much. In general, people do not generally come to Google and ask, how many rocks should I eat per day? It's not the type of question that, that of work in general on testing search and
2:54 Speaker 01 look at the types of queries people come. And so this became a new avenue of these types of questions that are sort of false premise, right? They're not, they're not really logical questions that people are asking. But we really worked, we, we took the feedback and worked on it quickly to try and address and have improved the quality even further. And I think that's the, going to be the nature of technology. Search has been through this times before. You know, we in general help people quite substantially with queries, but that doesn't mean we're perfect and we'll continue to grow and improve based on the feedback.
3:23 Alex Kantrowitz? Right. And, you know, it's kind of like a jokey thing and kind of funny. I don't think anybody was harmed from that. If you ate the rocks, we apologize, but probably, you know, you have other problems than, than that. But, you know, it gets set to, to a more serious question, which is that the reason why that this came up on Google is because Google is ingesting more of the web and presenting it in the search response place, whereas before it would send people out to websites to sort of, you know, find their own answers. But I have a question for you, and this is sort of like the core question about this entire push into, you know, answering with AI is why is it good for Google to sort of take in some of the web and present it in the answer space to search queries? And then why is it good for the web to have that happen?
4:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, so I think at the heart, people are always have tons of questions in their head, right? We talk about how human curiosity is really boundless. What does limit that, though, is technology, and it's limited also by people's lives. They have limited time. They have limited energy to spend figuring out how they ask questions. And so one of the challenges when technology limits is that people don't ask all the questions they're curious about. They're curious about the question, they think about it for like a split second and decide it's too much work to get the answer, and then they move on with their day. And when you can, with technology, lower the barrier, then you actually allow people to come ask the questions. And so what we find with AI
4:50 Speaker 01 overviews is it unlocks new queries for a variety of reasons, and this is why we see usage. The first could be you have a question that sort of isn't directly answered by any webpage. The information is scattered across the web. And so the amount of effort of taking you to get started would be much higher. Okay, oftentimes, people don't know how to phrase the question. You know, some of us who've been using it for a while will talk about keyword ease, right? This idea that you take your question and you have to translate it in a way a computer needs to answer it. And so with AI overviews, you're kind of shifting the paradigm, right? The technology is using it to transform the answer in a way that the information can come to you. Okay, but I don't view AI overviews
5:34 Speaker 01 as sort of an end. I view it as a jumping off point. Okay, get you started with your question and allow you to dig deeper into the web. And I think one of the things we see with AI overviews is that they show up a broader set of sources, a wider range of sources across. And you can think about that as if you asked your question, only some number of webpages, if any, could be zero, will directly answer your question. They might talk about this aspect, another website might talk about this aspect, right? If you're comparing two things, maybe nobody compared those two things on the web. The best information is in different sources. And so with AI reviews, you can kind of get started, but then you can dive in to sources that might talk about each aspect in greater
6:16 Speaker 01 detail. And so I think it's a chance for sort of the richest, the deepest information on the web to surface more easily, to allow more of the niche. I also think it fundamentally just grows the pie. People ask more questions. This gives more of an opportunity for everyone.
6:32 Alex Kantrowitz? So Liz, if AI overviews, the AI answers that Google is presenting on top of the web when you start to ask questions to it, if that really takes off, are we going to need the web anymore? Now, you know, I've heard you say that it grows the pie, but is there a chance that the web just goes away?
6:53 Speaker 01 I don't think so. I think what we see again and again with our UX research is that people are really interested to hear from other people. They want to hear their perspectives, their take on things. They want to get that experience about what is it actually like? Let's say you're going to Yosemite. I have young kids. I want to find stroller-friendly trails. I don't just want to know what are the stroller-friendly trails. I also want to hear the tips from other parents that have gone through it. And so I view it, I view it as like, this is a misconception that people sort of either want a text answer or links. People actually often want to get started and then they want
7:34 Speaker 01 to dig deeper. They want to hear from others and learn. And I think this has been true throughout the whole internet across. I mean, anyone who clicked on a Wikipedia page, oh, in theory, they came to the Wikipedia page for the answer, right? But then they clicked on more, right? Because what happens is, is you get information, your curiosity gets sparked, and you have new questions and you dig deeper. And I think that desire to hear from other people will continue indefinitely. And it's part of the beauty of the web.
8:01 Alex Kantrowitz? But people hearing this might say, okay, it's only an inevitability that they're asking questions and then they want to hear from other people. And all right, Google's already taking step one of giving the basic information from the web pages. They're in AI overviews. Eventually, it's just going to be a dialogue with Google and then they're going to get to hear from people through Google and never end up on a website.
8:23 Speaker 01 Yeah. I mean, I think people can have all different views about where they're going. I am personally someone who is not as excited to hear somebody else tell me what somebody else said, right? Like, it's a little different to go and hear what you say, Alex, than for somebody else to say, well, Alex said XYZ, right? When you really want to hear what Alex said, then you want to hear from Alex directly, right? And so I think that... That connection to actually people's experience and their words in the way that they express it will continue.
8:52 Alex Kantrowitz? And this is sort of getting to a deeper issue here. When ChatGPT initially came out, people said, okay, this is going to replace search, but it actually seems like you're going to have a very different experience with a chatbot, talking with a chatbot, an AI chatbot, and then searching for stuff on the web. I'm curious if you think that that's the case as well and how you would describe those two different experiences.
9:17 Speaker 01 I think there is this question about, do you actually want to both connect to the web from the purpose of, you know, hearing other people's perspectives? But it's also oftentimes people come to the web to accomplish tasks, right? You're going to go find shoes, okay? You don't want to just know what are some of the shoes? You actually want to get to the shoe site and buy the shoes, right? And so I think of search as, you know, at its heart, it was always about helping you reach all the world's information, connecting you to all of that, and I think it will continue. I think if you take something different like Gemini, it is much more focused on being that collaborator, helping you sort of think through some things. Maybe you're going to brainstorm how you write that letter to that, you know, you're
10:02 Speaker 01 trying to work with someone to help you with gardening, right? How do you write a note to that person? They're going to have some overlap. Lots of tools over time have overlap across, but I think they're going to focus on different things and and search is going to continue to focus heavily on information journeys and connecting you to to great sources.
10:18 Alex Kantrowitz? So does search then evolve eventually to become some sort of agent? You know, everyone's talking about agentic AI. Is that really the thing that we should we should be thinking about when it comes to search?
10:27 Speaker 01 I think everyone has a different definition of agents about what they mean. But I think what will
10:32 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, I'll just give one. I mean, you talked about how it's like people, for instance, might be using search to do something. So for instance, let's say I'm trying to book a table at a restaurant. I would come to Google and be like, all right, you know, searching that restaurant. And then generally, there's going to be a link to OpenTable or whatever it is, or the websites or the restaurant's webpage, and then I would book it. So like, isn't it a natural step to say, all right, Google booked me a table at a restaurant? And Google has been trying to do this with Assistant for a while. And now it seems like the technology is catching up.
11:03 Speaker 01 I think we'll continue to see the tech trying to make some of those actions easier and easier. I think one of the things that Assistant has done over the time was it helped, for instance, with some of the phone calls, right? Okay, if you wanted to book a restaurant and you're busy and they're busy and it doesn't work, how is it going to continue to make it easier? But I think the world is still pretty early on and we don't understand all the possibilities, right? Do some of these sites themselves have agents that they provide to make it easy to book? And so how does Google interact with other agents? How does it create more agent capabilities itself? I think both of those will evolve. But what I do think is true is you sort of go back to this question about how do you help users, right? What are the ways in which users' life are difficult?
11:48 Speaker 01 What are the ways in which some of the merchants' life are difficult? And how can we use technology to actually make that easier for everyone? And I think that's when we approach in search, we're constantly asking that question. What is difficult about what people do? What are the barriers they have to information? And can we actually democratize understanding of information? Can we democratize access and ability to do things? I think that's what's really exciting with AI.
12:11 Alex Kantrowitz? One of the barriers that we have sometimes when we search is that we're sort of going to the web, to this sort of web that doesn't change depending on who we are. And the results often don't change depending on who we are. So are we going to get to a point where Google could use AI to customize the results based on the person we are? Like, call it an agent or call it not. Let's say you like Thai food and you go to Detroit and you search "restaurant near me." Like, is there going to come to a point where Google's going to be like, "Okay, this is a person who's told me they like Thai food. Let's give them the Thai restaurants in Detroit."
12:49 Speaker 01 I think we will find that the technology does increase personalization over time. Um, I think it's going to be more nuanced than your description. So as someone who worked on local for a while, people want Thai restaurants, but if they often go to Thai restaurants, they don't want just Thai restaurants. If they're like, I just want a Thai restaurant, I would have just searched for Thai restaurants Detroit in the first place. Right. Um, and sometimes you're going out with friends and maybe those friends love Thai restaurants and maybe they don't. Right. Um, but I think actually helping you understand if you go to Detroit, what are the types of places? These are some of your favorite cuisines. You want to try something different about, um, what is the favorite cuisines in Detroit? Can we help you make sense of all those different restaurants and help you find options?
13:33 Speaker 01 Um, I do think that's, uh, an evolution technology has started on it will get more advanced at understanding things. Um, and you'll be able to share more instead of you just searching for Thai restaurants or restaurants. Do you say I'm going with, you know, five friends, I'm going in the middle of the peak hour, you know, at six thirty or something and I want, um, I don't want to wait time and I would really like delicious food, but I have a child who doesn't have dairy. Okay. Then what do you, you know, what do you give it to me? Um, and so that ability to not just have the, the tech personalized, but you to actually be much clearer about all of your needs, I think will grow. And that's what we started to see with generative AI is that people are asking longer queries. They ask longer queries because they can now share more of what they actually want.
14:17 Speaker 01 Um, in the query and believe that the tech will give them a good answer.
14:20 Alex Kantrowitz? So I'm saying like, maybe you end up in dialogue with these search engines. But for you, it's more just like, you're going to just like write a lot more before you get an answer. Or could it be both?
14:29 Speaker 01 I, I don't think, I don't think it's one or the other. I think people will vary. Uh, I think dialogue is often true. Um, sort of if you take the extreme of you only dialogue, but you know 12 things and that's slow, right? If I have five things I want, I just want to tell you all at once. Other times you don't actually know what you want. Uh, lots of times people are looking to be inspired. And so they might just say, hey, I'm going to Detroit. Where should I eat? And then you might come back with some options and then continue to do follow up. So I think anyone who tells you all of the tech will be, everyone will write really long things or they'll only write short things or like, I don't, I don't think people are like that. They don't always know what they want. Sometimes they know a lot. Different people approach differently.
15:13 Speaker 01 And I think what will be important is the tech adapts much more, right? Even you've seen one of the things people have done with some of the generator back is ask for simpler answers. Right? You go and you ask this question and then they give you this answer that assumes that you know everything. And you don't actually know enough and you can be like, whoa, whoa, can you make it easier? Or I want to go explain this to my five year old. Can you help me do that? And so that ability for the tech to transform to where you are, instead of you coming to where the information is, I think is exciting.
15:43 Alex Kantrowitz? Right. And this is sort of building up to some of the new features that you're announcing within search. So I'm just going to read it right from your blog post. You say, we're rolling out search results page organized with AI in the U.S. Beginning with recipes and meal inspiration on mobile using a customized Gemini model. You'll now see a full page experience with relevant results organized just for you. You can easily explore content and perspectives from across the web, including articles, videos, forums and more all in one place. And you say in our testing, people have found AI organized search results pages are more helpful. And then they're helping them discover new content. So it is interesting to see that this is the direction that it's going in.
16:25 Alex Kantrowitz? Obviously you talked a little bit about, you talked a little bit about wanting to see things more clearly. And there's going to be toggles, right? Where like you can get the long paragraph or a bunch of paragraphs from AI or the bullet points or something a little bit briefer. So talk a little bit about what went into shipping this change on search.
16:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think this is one of the cases where we believe that people still want to deeply connect to the web. Right? You know, I have debates with people about whether or not one day all of their recipes are going to be generated by AI or not. But I am personally someone who prefers to get that recipe that, you know, a great chef created that has lots of reviews to understand what that is, as opposed to something made up on the fly. But if you take something like recipes, it can be daunting. There are so many recipes out there. How do you make sense of it? How do you even understand different groupings? If I love videos, is it easy to access them? And so we think AI has an opportunity to do much more than something like AI overviews,
17:23 Speaker 01 to actually rethink the entire search results page and sort of group it in ways that are very logical for you, in ways that allow you to browse and get inspired across and connect with different recipes all over the web. And that's really exciting to see. And we're starting with recipes, but we'll continue to go more broadly and really think about the question about if I don't know much, if I'm just browsing a topic, how does AI use it to make sense of it for you?
17:49 Alex Kantrowitz? I'm surprised to hear you say that recipes are going to be something that people are going to want to go to the web for because to me, it just feels like it's going to be the exact opposite, that they're just going to go to AI. And they're going to be smart about these queries and say, listen, like, give me a recipe for this dish in the spirit of this chef. And then it just spits it out and you don't have to scroll through like all the, all that text that you do now on Google, when you're finding a webpage through Google.
18:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think-
18:16 Alex Kantrowitz? You really think we're going to want to be on the web? It's like the worst experience on the web is recipes.
18:21 Speaker 01 I think there are, there are definitely recipe webpages that are better or worse than others, although I think there are great videos on that. I think you often want a tried recipe, right? I mean, I think we'll see where AI, how far AI goes. But now when they want to do this, they make up recipes that, the AI makes up recipes that have roughly the right ingredients in some somewhat random proportion, right? I think that's different than that experience of hearing a great tried and true recipe. I do think some of the webpages of recipes could be nicer to consume for sure. But a, but a tried and true recipe, I think goes a long way. And people spend lots of time crafting recipes of their flavor. So we'll see, we'll see where it goes. We'll see where it goes over time. But I think certainly
19:06 Speaker 01 at this point in time, people really still appreciate actually trusted recipes instead of made up recipes on the fly.
19:13 Alex Kantrowitz? Liz, let me ask you this. You're the head of search at Google. A lot of people look at these recipe pages and they say they're just responding to Google. And that's why you have to scroll through like, you know, 3,000 characters of text before you get to the recipe. Why is that happening? And can you fix that?
19:29 Speaker 01 We-
19:32 Speaker 01 Our guidelines do not actually encourage you to put 3,000 lines of characters, but people continue to do that for a variety of reasons. We are trying to continue to experiment with what are ways with recipes to make them easier to consume, because we do hear user frustration on browsing some of the recipes. So we'll continue to focus on how do we make higher quality and we'll experiment and work with the ecosystem and think about how can we make the recipe experience better, broader, not just on the search results page, but in your whole journey.
20:02 Alex Kantrowitz? So another thing that we're seeing is that Google is getting more interested in visual search. This is, again, from your blog post, you're going to have video understanding in Google Lens, so Google Lens is a product where you can point it at different scenes in the real world and it will give you information, so it can understand in real time with video. You can ask it questions with voice, you can shop the things that, the items that you see with Lens. Talk a little bit about these updates with Lens. And honestly, like, I'm not a Lens person, but it seems like it's a big product within Google, so what is the adoption looking like right now?
20:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, at this point, we have nearly 20 billion queries a month across, and it's one of our fastest growing segments, so people really do enjoy it. I think people have a range of different questions they go, so they'll do it from homework or education, they'll see a plant and want to ask, but they'll also go see a cool shirt online and want to figure out where they can go get it, right? And so they use it for a range of questions. All those questions we saw before with Lens, you'd see people attempt to issue these queries, and it's really hard. Can I have a shirt that's kind of striped but really thin? Like, it was just very difficult to describe. There's a reason people say a picture is worth a thousand words.
21:20 Speaker 01 And so as we unlocked that, we saw people ask more and more questions. And so the addition of things like video and voice that we're announcing today is really just the continuation. Of our efforts to make search more natural and intuitive. That's what you might do with a friend. You might point to something and ask about it. It's what you might do to a shopkeeper. Can I find a dress like that, but in green? Okay. The, a common example with video that we find people like a lot is appliances. The appliance goes, it breaks and something is blinking and you don't really know how to describe it. And you're like, what is wrong with this thing? And now you can take a video, point it at it and, and ask, you know, what's wrong? How do I fix this? And it will understand what's actually going on with the different blinking lights and
22:05 Speaker 01 give you tips.
22:08 Speaker 01 Other times we've done examples where people pointed and asked about a game they know how to play. In my household, uh, rules get dropped, get deleted somehow. They get, I don't know where they go. I don't know if they get thrown out, but somehow the instructions constantly disappear. And then you want to go back and play that game. You haven't played for a while. How do you actually play it? Right? You can very quickly then point at the game and say, how do I play this? And I'll give you instructions. So continue to ask this question about how do we make search really natural? How do we make it as easy as it would be to ask a friend who happened to know everything? And we just continue along that multimodality has really been exciting to watch what people do with it.
22:47 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, this seems like it's a growing format across all tech companies. I don't know if you watched Apple's recent iPhone event, but they introduced this thing called visual intelligence where it seems a lot like Lens and I called it Lens Redux. I mean, what was your reaction when you saw that?
23:02 Speaker 01 I think it's, it's not surprising that when you find these use cases that are really helpful for people, which Lens has been, that, that others will look into helping people with it.
23:13 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
23:13 Speaker 01 I think we're going to continue to make Lens cutting edge and really build great technology and we're going to focus on helping our users.
23:21 Alex Kantrowitz? Great. And talk again about the adoption of Lens. So people, lots of people are using it.
23:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, nearly 20 billion searches every month for Lens at this point.
23:29 Alex Kantrowitz? And how does that compare to like text searches?
23:33 Speaker 01 We don't share overall numbers on tech searches, but it's a pretty remarkable growth, given it's basically been about six years Lens has gone, and so from no one doing it to everyone doing that. And obviously, there are some searches that are difficult to express with visuals, so it has been quite exciting to see. Our younger users particularly like it.
23:52 Alex Kantrowitz? So when Netflix came out, Netflix was all about mailing you DVDs, and they said there was something in the name that was prescient, right? That you would eventually watch your flicks on the net. And lo and behold, it's a streaming service today. And the name Lens, very interesting, because a lens is something you might have in a pair of glasses. It's not really something that people think about with a phone. Is this just this product where you point your phone and you ask Google things about the things you see in the real world? And you're seeing a lot of growth with it. Is this just a middle stage before you end up putting this technology in glasses?
24:36 Speaker 01 I think as glasses come out, the technology feels very logical to put out in glasses. I think we're a long way away from everyone having glasses in practice. And so I think probably even as Lens, even as glasses come out, people will continue to do it with their phone. But I do think it's a very logical thing to bring to glasses as well, to ask questions that you see in the real world. And so I think we'll continue to help people as glasses come such a way.
25:05 Alex Kantrowitz? We just had Andrew Bosworth, the Chief Technology Officer of Meta, on the show last week, and we talked about Orion, which is, I think, the first legitimate augmented reality piece of technology I've ever seen. I had a chance to try it out. I've talked about it on the show before. I talked about it with Boz. I mean, it is crazy. It layers computing right on the real world without needing to wear like the Vision Pro or the Oculus. What did you think when you saw that come out, saw that piece of technology come out? Because that is, it seems like that's the end form factor that like something like a lens would be useful for.
25:42 Speaker 01 I think we continue to see form factors that both layer on top of each other. So I don't think there's a one size fits all in the same way that mobile didn't completely replace desktop either. And so I would expect that that people have a set. But I do think that question of glasses asks, or some other form factor that's just on your face, you have questions all of the time. And if you don't have to pull out your phone, and you can just ask right away, just faster, right?
26:12 Alex Kantrowitz? So but were you impressed when you saw when you saw Orion?
26:14 Speaker 01 I haven't got to play with I haven't got to play with Orion myself in person to to know what it's like on the one. So I just have seen the news articles.
26:22 Alex Kantrowitz? Isn't it so the history of Google, though, right? If you think about it, a website on Internet Explorer, a toolbar on Internet Explorer, a browser, a mobile operating system, Google has always gotten ahead of the latest way to deliver, yeah, to deliver search to you in the actual place you are, so to speak. Isn't it incumbent on Google to build a pair of glasses like that? Is that in development?
26:51 Speaker 01 I'm not in a good position to speak of that. We can have you follow up with Ashley to know more on on Google's plans more broadly. But I do think search is well positioned with the technology we've been building on for multimodality and making information accessible that as that technology evolves will continue to be really helpful for people.
27:11 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay, so let's just talk about, speaking of adoption, let's talk about the performance of AI overviews, which we've talked about a bit here. I don't know if it's I've had it long enough, but I haven't fully noticed it. But I asked my folks on X, are they noticing AI overviews in search? And 84% of people have noticed them. So can you talk a little bit about the adoption and and the response from users now that AI overviews are out in public?
27:40 Speaker 01 What we've seen is is sort of three things that I would highlight. First, that people who encounter AI overviews, they search more. Because basically, those questions that they would previously think about and decide not to ask, they bring to Google Search. So it's not just that they search more in the moment, they'll actually come back to search more often directly. The second is that they find those results more helpful. They like the balance of both the overview and the ability to jump off and dig more on the web, and that balance, they really appreciate. And the third is that they get to encounter a wider range of sources across the web that they can experience. And I would say, overall, I've been quite pleased watching it. It's the type of thing where you're like, it's a brand-new technology, how will people
28:24 Speaker 01 encounter it? And the level of satisfaction, both in the results, but in the choice to come to Google Search more, that's a high bar to get people to decide to take out their phone in extra time, right? And so when you see that sense that people actually issue more queries, you know that you're really building something that people value.
28:43 Alex Kantrowitz? And that brings up new questions in terms of monetization and ad product, and also what it means for news publishers. So I want to talk about that and more when we come back, right after this. This episode is brought to you by AppPoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now: co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about: All that AI runs on your data, and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what AppPoint does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate: your data, your cloud, and the agents acting on your
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29:54 Speaker 02 Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
30:24 Speaker 03 Bonjour, compadre. It's the
30:28 Speaker 03 How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget, the Priceline app. It's got hotel deals, flight deals, rental car deals, all of those deals in a bundle. Deals, game day deals, concert trip deals. No one deals more deals than Priceline. Hold your horses, there's more. The app lets you filter hotels by neighborhood, vibe, star level, and amenities, like pools and spas and beachfronts. And, wait, I'm not done. Stop cutting me off.
30:54 Alex Kantrowitz? And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Liz Reid, who runs Search for Google. Liz, so you also have some news on the ad front that you're starting to include some more advertising within AI overviews. Can you talk to us a little bit about what's going on on that front?
31:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, so a lot of questions that people come to us are sometimes pretty broad in their intent. We don't know exactly where they're going. And AI overviews will often help you go into different aspects of the question that you have. And some of those aspects have more opportunities for you to connect with relevant businesses. And so we're starting to show ads in this. A good example might be you're trying to figure out how to clean a sofa. Some people just want the, you know, club soda trick, and they want ideas like that. And other people are like, no, I tried all of those. I'm up for buying a cleaning product. And so the AI overview might say, okay, tips for cleaning are, you know, this thing, this thing, this thing. And you can buy a fabber cleaner,
31:54 Speaker 01 and then we'll show relevant ads on there. And what we see is that we're able to do it in a way in which people find the ads helpful, because they're really zeroing in on the part of the problem that's interesting for people at that moment. And for those who want the other ideas, then they can still get that answer, too. And so it's a nice way to balance all of the different ways someone might consider a different topic.
32:17 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay, I don't want to go without asking you about Notebook LM, which is like the hottest tech product in the world right now. It's not your team, but
32:26 Speaker 01 It's not my team, but that's fine.
32:28 Alex Kantrowitz? I've just tried it out. You can dump lots of notes in there, ask questions about it. And then the craziest thing is that it has like these, this basically will create a podcast based off of what you're, the information you've dumped into notes and it's crazy. So talk a little bit about what, you know, you obviously had access to this earlier. What's it been like internally? What kind of use cases are people finding for it? And is it just like kind of a, something that's a magic trick? That feels cool on the surface? Or like people actually spending time listening to those podcasts?
33:01 Speaker 01 I think people are playing around a bunch with, with different podcasts. And I would say a few things on that. Number one, much of the web is designed with an assumption that, that everyone is a visual learner. It's not actually true. Some people actually learn, you know, listening much more effectively.
33:19 Alex Kantrowitz? Shout out to our listeners.
33:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, shout out. People have time on their commutes, right? That is, is a time to go learn about something to explore? And how does that change what's possible? But I also think it's not just about audio versus visual. There's, there's something about how podcasts are sort of often more discussion or dialogue based that actually is easier sometimes for people to learn about it, right? I occasionally, through, through a family member, will try and read these medical journals. They're extremely dense. It's extremely difficult to try and understand them. And I don't necessarily have like three hours to go look up every other jargon word.
34:03 Speaker 01 But actually, if I can go and, and create a podcast out of them and understand, then I can help my family member more effectively, right? And so I think that's a, it's another cool way with podcasts to think about how can you unlock information? You know, if you think about Google's mission, it was not just organize the world's information. It was make it accessible and useful, right? And there's a lot of times where information today is like technically accessible in that I can access it, but not in that it feels accessible to me, not in that it feels useful to me. And so I think podcasts is a cool example of changing to a world where information
34:43 Speaker 01 goes from being available to useful to me. And that will be exciting to see how we innovate in that space.
34:50 Alex Kantrowitz? So are AI podcasts going to put me out of business?
34:53 Speaker 01 I don't think so. I think they should make, you know, I think they should make you able to write better podcasts if we do our job right.
34:59 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay, well, we'll find out. Liz Reid, great to speak with you. Thanks so much for being here.
35:04 Speaker 01 Thank you. It's a pleasure.
35:06 Alex Kantrowitz? All right, everybody. Thank you for listening, and we'll be back on Friday with our breakdown of the week's news. Until then, we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.
35:14 Speaker 02 Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPact.com, not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
35:44 Speaker 04 In this life, you can't win.
35:46 Speaker 05 When the world gets you down.
35:47 Speaker 04 No!
35:48 Speaker 05 Escape to Pluto TV.
35:49 Speaker 04 This is objectively fantastic.
35:51 Speaker 05 Relax into the movies and shows you already know and love, all for free. Shwing! Even our news is uplifting.
35:57 Speaker 03 You stay classy, San Diego.
35:59 Speaker 05 Watch School of Rock, Crazy Ex Girlfriend, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The Ex-Files, Wayne's World, and so much more.
36:04 Alex Kantrowitz? We're not worthy!
36:06 Speaker 05 The best things on TV really are free. You just have to know where to look. Escape to Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.
Previous OpenAI’s $6.6 Billion Fundraise, Meta’s Quiet Election, Imaginary AI Friends Next OpenAI's Financials Revealed, Tesla Robotaxi Debut, Shein's Weird CEO Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
