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Key takeaways

• Gemini 3 has landed.
• Google embedded the new model into Search.
• The new Search is available to Google AI and Ultra subscribers.

Google just made the biggest change to its search engine since the company introduced AI Overviews last year.

The company officially debuted Gemini 3, its latest AI model, on Tuesday morning, and has already integrated it with Search, which Google says will enable deeper contextual awareness, more sophisticated reasoning capabilities, and multimedia responses to help users unlock more useful information from the web.

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This marks the first time that a new AI model from Google has been fused with its search engine from the jump, which signals a growing level of confidence from the company as it races against OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon -- both to deploy new models and make them accessible through existing consumer-facing tools. 

New search capabilities

The newly upgraded Google search is designed to simultaneously optimize for both range and specificity: it covers a wider portion of the web to search for all relevant results to a given query, and is also engineered to read between the lines of that query, as it were, to get a clear sense of the user's true intent.

Technically speaking, that means Gemini 3 builds on Search's existing query fan-out technique: "not only can it perform even more searches to uncover relevant web content, but because Gemini more intelligently understands your intent it can find new content that it may have previously missed," Elizabeth Reid, vice president and head of search at Google, wrote in the announcement.

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Google has growing competition in this regard. AI startups like OpenAI and Perplexity have launched their own AI-powered web browsers with an eye toward stealing a slice of the pie that's long been hoarded by Google with its undisputed dominance over online search.

But Google has the obvious advantage: that millions of people already rely on its browser and search engine, which means that it can easily embed its new AI model into those people's daily online routines, just as it did -- like it or not -- with AI Overviews.

Reid added in the blog post that, in the coming weeks, Google will also update its automatic model selection feature in Search, so that the most challenging queries automatically get funneled to Gemini 3 while older and faster models tackle easier tasks.

Custom visual aids

Google Search is also getting a multimodal upgrade thanks to the newly released Gemini 3.

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Rather than just responding with text, web links, and images, Gemini 3 in AI Mode can automatically generate visual aids to help users gain a more thorough understanding of the information they're seeking. 

"When the model detects that an interactive tool will help you better understand the topic, it uses its generative capabilities to code a custom simulation or tool in real-time and adds it into your response," Reid wrote in the blog post.

If you're trying to wrap your mind around the infamous double-slit experiment, for example -- which is foundational to quantum dynamics and shows that subatomic particles can act as both particles and waves -- the newly upgraded, multimodal Google search might provide you with an interactive simulation so that, rather than just reading about the experiment, you can directly engage with it. Welcome news, no doubt, to the many people out there who consider themselves visual and/or hands-on learners.

How to access Gemini 3

Gemini 3 Pro, the first of the new family of Gemini 3 family of models, is available now for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. To take the new model's search capabilities for a spin, just select "Thinking" from the drop-down menu in AI Mode. The company plans to release the new model via AI mode to all US users soon, with higher limits for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers.

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