Google Turning Its Lucrative Web Search Over to AI Machines

When Google-parent Alphabet Inc. reported eye-popping earnings its executives couldn’t stop talking up the company’s investments in machine learning and artificial intelligence. For any other company that would be a wonky distraction from its core business. At Google, the two are intertwined. Artificial intelligence sits at the extreme end of machine learning, which sees people create software that can learn about the world. Google has been one of the biggest corporate sponsors of AI, and has invested heavily in it for videos, speech, translation and, recently, search.

Google’s decision to deploy AI into search shows that companies are starting to entrust their most valuable businesses to systems controlled in part by machine intelligence. Facebook uses AI techniques to filter the newsfeed that comprises the personalized homepage of the social network and Microsoft is using artificial intelligence to increase the capabilities of its Bing search engine. Microsoft declined to be more specific about whether it’s using a similar approach to Google.