Search Now Runs on Gemini 3.5 Flash—and Starts Acting Like an Assistant
Google’s latest overhaul turns classic Search into an AI-first experience powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash, billed as the biggest revamp in a quarter century. Flash, now the default model behind AI Mode in Search and in the Gemini app, delivers faster performance and stronger “agentic” abilities, particularly for coding and task completion. Instead of a static results page, users can ask long, conversational questions, follow up naturally, and get synthesized responses that resemble a chat with an assistant rather than a list of links. This unified search box blends conventional keyword search with Gemini’s reasoning, so there’s less pressure to phrase queries “correctly.” With AI Overviews feeding directly into AI Mode, Google is deliberately erasing the interface boundary between search results and chatbot-style interaction. The result: Search increasingly behaves like Gemini, even before you intentionally open the standalone Gemini experience.
From Search Box to Multimodal Command Center
The familiar search bar is becoming a multimodal command hub. Powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash, AI Mode now accepts text, images, videos, files, and even Chrome tabs as inputs, letting users “brain dump” context instead of carefully curating keywords. The interface expands to handle longer, conversational prompts and then generates interactive content in response—mini apps, dashboards, visualizations, and custom widgets built on the fly via Google’s Antigravity platform. You might ask about astrophysics and see an interactive visualization next to links, or assemble a persistent fitness tracker that pulls from weather, calendar, and location data. This is more than AI-powered search features; it’s an attempt to make Search the place where you not only look things up, but also build tools, explore complex topics, and manage ongoing projects. Traditional web results remain, but they now sit beside an increasingly powerful, Gemini-driven canvas.
Agentic Search Features: Information Agents and Task Completion
The most transformative change is Search’s new agentic search features—tools that don’t just answer questions but keep working after you close the tab. Information agents in AI Mode operate continuously in the background, scanning the web for updates tied to your specific instructions. You can dump detailed requirements for an apartment hunt or ask to be alerted when favorite athletes launch sneaker collaborations, and the agent monitors blogs, news, social posts, and real-time data to notify you when conditions are met. Google is also expanding agentic booking: Search can call businesses on your behalf for home repair, beauty, or pet care appointments. Meanwhile, agentic coding lets you shape how results look and behave, from generative UI elements to custom mini tools. Together, these capabilities push Search beyond retrieval into execution—handling monitoring, outreach, and simple workflows that previously belonged to dedicated apps or human assistants.
If Search Does Everything, Why Keep Gemini Separate?
As Google Search gains multimodal understanding, conversational reasoning, and persistent agents, the distinction between Search and Gemini has blurred. Search’s job used to be simple: find and rank links. Gemini, by contrast, was the AI assistant that interpreted information, generated content, and interacted across media. Now, AI Overviews, AI Mode, and information agents import much of that assistant behavior directly into Search, prompting a natural question: what is Gemini for if Search can already act like Gemini? Some observers argue that Search needed this AI infusion to stay relevant as users adopt more natural, chatty query styles. Others see an identity crisis, with two overlapping products that share models, capabilities, and even interfaces. Polls already show users are unsure whether these should be merged or kept separate—a sign that Google’s branding and product boundaries are now as much a strategic problem as a technical one.
Confusion or Convenience? What This Means for Everyday Users
For users, the Google Search Gemini integration is a double-edged shift. On the convenience side, there’s less mental overhead: you can start in the search box for nearly anything—fact-finding, planning, monitoring, or light coding—and the system adapts. The multimodal search capabilities mean you can mix screenshots, videos, and text without switching apps. Agentic features promise time savings as Search quietly tracks markets, listings, or niche interests on your behalf. Yet the overlap with the standalone Gemini app risks confusion. Do you open Gemini or just search? Is AI Mode in Search “the same” as Gemini, or a subset? Persistent agents tied to Search also raise notification fatigue and data trust questions, especially as personal intelligence features pull in email and photos. Google is betting users will tolerate some ambiguity in exchange for power and simplicity; whether that trade-off feels worth it will depend on how seamlessly these experiences stay aligned.