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Tech Fix
AI Mode excels at tasks like product research for online shopping. But it falls short on basic web searches.
Brian X. Chen is The Times’s lead consumer technology writer and the author of Tech Fix, a column about the tech we use.
May 29, 2025, 11:14 a.m. ET
Last week, I asked Google to help me plan my daughter’s birthday party by finding a park in Oakland, Calif., with picnic tables. The site generated a list of parks nearby, so I went to scout two of them out — only to find there were, in fact, no tables.
“I was just there,” I typed to Google. “I didn’t see wooden tables.”
Google acknowledged the mistake and produced another list, which again included one of the parks with no tables.
I repeated this experiment by asking Google to find an affordable carwash nearby. Google listed a service for $25, but when I arrived, a carwash cost $65.
I also asked Google to find a grocery store where I could buy an exotic pepper paste. Its list included a nearby Whole Foods, which didn’t carry the item.
I wasn’t doing traditional web searches on Google.com. I was testing the company’s new AI Mode, a tool that is similar to chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, where users can type in questions to get answers. AI Mode, which is rolling out worldwide in the coming weeks, will soon appear as a tab next to your Google.com search results.
The arrival of AI Mode underscores how new technology is redefining what it means to search for something online. For decades, a web search involved looking up keywords, like “most reliable car brands,” to show a list of relevant websites.
