Google Search

Google Search

Basic Information
Release Year	1998
Product Type	Search Engine
In Production	Yes
Official Website	https://www.google.com

Google Search is a search engine created and developed by Google LLC. It was released on September 27th, 1998.

• User privacy: Google Search stores long-term cookies to save user's preferences, something that has raised privacy concerns.

• User freedom: Some features such as AI overview or AI mode cannot be completely disabled. The user cannot change the ranking of results other than by crafting queries and changing keywords. Google adds positive bias for ads and partner sites such as Reddit.^[1][2]

• Business model: Google Search engine gets revenue from ads shown at the top of search results.

• Market control: Google Search engine is the most used search engine in the world. According to StatCounter, Google Search has a 90.2% market share as of April 2026.^[3] They pay Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine on Safari and Firefox, respectively.

The search engine didn't have any ads at the beginning, but since October 2000, Google integrated ads at the top of the search results, being easily differenciable from regular search links. Over time, the platform has modified the hyperlink ads appearence to disguise them better as regular links.

Since 2000, these ads appeared at first in a yellow section, highlighting the hyperlinks inside that section were ads ^{[citation needed]}. Later this was modified, and the yellow section was removed and hyperlinks that were ads showed a small "ad" label next to them ^{[citation needed]}. In 2022, these labels were removed, and a "Sponsored" section was created. Links in this section have a similar appearence to links that are not ads. ^[4]

On January 30th 2026, Louis Rossmann uploaded a video on YouTube ^[5] evidencing how Google Search SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has been modified to penalize web sites that do not contain AI-generated text. On February 12, he uploaded another video, showing how he managed to make his website the first on the search results page by adding AI-generated text to the site. ^[6]

The integration of ads over the results when searching on Google Search have also brought as a consequence malicious websites disguised as genuine ads, something that has becomming more common over time. These malicious sites usually contain instructions to download malware or run malicious commands.

During May 2026, a security engineer named Berk Albayrak, found and shared information about malicious ad sites that redirect to official Claude website when searched "Claude download Mac" on Google. These sites contained malicious instructions for running malicious commands disguised as installation instructions, that actually were dedicated to steal user's data and remotely control the machine. ^[7][8]

Since 2023, along with the boom and pushes to generative AI, Google introduced AI-powered features onto the search engine, such as AI Overview and AI Mode. These features have caused several controversies and criticism either from users and publishers, highlighting aspects such as the inability to turn these AI features off, hallucinations provided by the AI that give false information to the user, the high resource consumption and environmental impact ^[9], reduction of human traffic on sites, potential information control and result biases, and privacy concerns.^{[citation needed (25 May 2026)]}

In May 2023, Google announced Search Generative Experience (SGE) for Google Search. AI Overview was released in May 2024 in the U.S.A. as an AI-powered feature that appears at the top of search results, showing an AI-generated summary of the search query.

It has been criticized for giving false information due to hallucinations that even devolved into suggesting performing harmful activities.^[10]

The implementation of this feature has ended in some cases involving lawsuits due to the misinformation provided by hallucinations^[11][12] and site owners suing Google for copyright infringements and antitrust practices.^[13]

There's no official method to completely disable AI Overview from search results. However, adding -ai at the end of search queries prevents the AI Overview to appear.^[14] Other workarounds to disable AI overviews include searching under the Web category or adding ?udm=14&q in the search link, after https://www.google.com/searchand before the query name. ^[15]

AI mode is a feature introduced for Google Search in 2025 as an alternative form to search information on the web. It presents a chat-like interface in where the user is able to send messages to a chatbot to search the web and find the content that might be relevant for them. Like AI overview, there's no official way to disable this feature.

In 2026, Google will introduce integrated ads into AI overview and AI mode. These ads might appear in the conversations with Google's AIs with a similar appearence to a regular answer, but they contain a small "sponsored" tag at the top of the reply, something that might be hard do identify at first glance. This form of integration has raised privacy and concerns about the potential usage of AI for manipulation and potential integrations that might make nearly impossible to differentiate between content that is and isn't an ad. ^[16]

On May 19th, 2026, during the Google I/O were announced additional AI integrations for the search engine. These integrations involve modifications of the Search box and integration of Google Gemini Flash 3.5, predictive algorithms and the integration of "Search Agents", customizable AI agents dedicated to operate and search in user's behalf.^[17][18]

During that day, Google modified its UI, moving the "Web" tab, locating it under the "More" tab. This is a dark pattern made as an attempt to encourage users to use the AI features such as Overview and prevent them to use workarounds.^{[citation needed]}

The users' backlash over Google's search engine have increased the installations and visits to other alternative engines that allow to opt-out from AI features or are completely free of them, such as Brave Search, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo or Bing. According to DuckDuckGo, during May 20 and May 25, app installs in the US rose by 18.1%, with installs peaking at 30.5% during May 25.^[19]

• DuckDuckGo
• Bing