Emerging AI-driven search tools challenge Google by offering direct and explorative answers, but struggle to match its speed, diverse functionalities, and efficient data presentation, underscoring the complexity of replacing traditional search with AI.

Elasticsearch was not scaling well for DoorDash’s search engine and lacked customization for the company’s needs in modeling complex data and search ranking, so DoorDash built its own search engine using Apache Lucene, a core search library, and designed its own indexer and searcher to meet its specific requirements. The indexer processes documents into easily searchable formats, while the searcher replicates index data and uses Lucene's search functionality to match queries and rank results.

Billions of Google users will soon see AI-generated summaries at the top of many of their search results. The AI Overviews are designed to take out the hard work of searching so users can focus on the important things. Google announced several other AI-powered features at its I/O developer conference, such as a feature in Lens that lets users search by capturing a video, a planning tool that can generate trip itineraries and meal plans with a single query, and suggestions within search results. While similar products have come under scrutiny for summarizing content and not directing users to the actual sources of information, Google says that early data shows that the new way of searching will actually lead to more clicks to the open web.

Google is incorporating AI into its search engine with features like "AI Overviews" and a new planning tool. It aims to deliver summarized answers, automatic categorization, and personalized results using its Gemini AI to understand queries, generate summaries, and design result pages. For users, this could mean a completely new way to interact with the internet: less typing, fewer tabs, and more chatting with a search engine.