Reid: Search volume is constrained by friction, not a lack of curiosity
Liz Reid · Inside Google's Generative AI Reinvention — With Nick Fox and Liz Reid · Aug 27, 2025 · at 54:58
Google VP of Search Liz Reid explains how multimodal features like Google Lens unlock latent user curiosity by reducing input effort.
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“Whether or not somebody asks a question isn't just a question about whether or not they had a question. It's whether or not it was worth their time. Right. And so people do that question, right? You were curious about the flower, but if you had to figure out how to describe the flower in words, No way. So you didn't ask the thing. Okay, but then now you can take a picture of it, and now you ask the question, right? It wasn't, there was, it wasn't like suddenly people became curious about what the flower was, or your plant is dying, and now people take a picture and say, why is it dying? How do I help it? They cared about whether their plant was dying. They just didn't know what to do about it, right? And so there's a lot of possibility to open up when you just lower the barrier to information access, lower the barrier to information understanding.”
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