Google details how it is using AI to improve search, including indexing individual passages from webpages, allowing searches for songs by humming, and more
This October 2020 disclosure reads differently after six years of follow-on coverage: the two headline features — passage-level indexing and humming-based song search — were early moves away from matching whole documents toward understanding queries and content at a finer grain. A year later Google layered its MUM model onto Search with features like “Things to know”, extending the same pattern from retrieval to multi-step comprehension.
The trajectory since has been consistent: multisearch went global in 2023, Lens gained voice-driven video search in 2024, and by 2025 the Web Guide experiment was grouping results into query aspects automatically. That arc makes this 2020 piece the baseline for measuring how much of Search Google has since rebuilt around AI.
First-order effects
Passage indexing changes which pages win long-tail queries — individual paragraphs on otherwise obscure pages can now rank against full documents, directly altering traffic distribution for publishers and SEO practitioners.
Second-order effects
Every input modality Google adds after this — camera, voice, humming, then multisearch and Lens video search in later coverage — reduces dependence on typed keywords, forcing site owners to optimize for intent and passages rather than exact-match terms.
Third-order effects
If retrieval keeps shifting toward AI interpretation of content, the endpoint already visible in the corpus is generation: Google's experiment replacing news headlines in results with AI-written ones shows the platform moving from surfacing publishers' text to producing its own — with publisher exposure to that substitution as the unresolved structural question.
The trend: Google Search is being progressively re-architected from ranking webpages to interpreting and generating answers across text, image, and audio — a shift whose groundwork this 2020 passage-indexing and hum-to-search announcement laid.
This is what I wanted Shazam to be from day one. You can whistle, too! So cool. Needs some work, though. It managed to recognize the Für Elise, but not Beethoven's 5th, and had a lot of trouble with Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. https://www.theverge.com/...
“Lastly, Google says it will let users search for songs by simply humming or whistling melodies, initially in English on iOS and in more than 20 languages on Android.” The commercial for this writes itself. https://venturebeat.com/...
Now you can search songs on Google by just humming, and I think it is mind-boggling. - “Hey Google, what's this song?” (Or use Google Search app) - Hum for 10-15 seconds - And you'll get the result. It really works! For Hindi songs too. https://blog.google/...
Do you know that song that goes, “da na na na na do do?” We bet Google Search does. 😉 Next time a song is stuck in your head, just #HumToSearch into the Google app and we'll identify the song. Perfect pitch not required → https://blog.google/... #SearchOn https://twitter.com/...
After years of google secretly listening to us hum songs poorly and never remembering song titles, they finally released #HumToSearch https://twitter.com/...
We shared a lot of new innovations in Search today as part of our #SearchOn event. Here's an overview covering things like spelling improvements, understanding passages and video moments, AR & Lens in Search and “hum to search” to find songs: https://blog.google/...