Did you know Google has a technology called FastSearch? Not the early-2000s version, but Google’s own FastSearch. Google says it’s faster than its main search engine, Google Search.

FastSearch is used by Gemini to help validate its responses. It’s quicker because it retrieves fewer documents than regular Google Search. While this can mean slightly lower quality compared to fully ranked Google Search results, it’s sufficient for grounding purposes.

Marie Haynes spotted this and shared it on X after reviewing the judge’s decision in Google’s monopoly case. The document states:

“”To ground its Gemini models, Google uses a proprietary technology called FastSearch. FastSearch is based on RankEmbed signals — a set of search ranking signals-and generates abbreviated, ranked web results that a model can use to produce a grounded response. FastSearch delivers results more quickly than Search because it retrieves fewer documents, but the resulting quality is lower than Search’s fully ranked web results.

Google does not make FastSearch directly available to third parties through an API. Rather, the technology is integrated into a Google Cloud offering called Vertex AI, which is available to third parties to ground on Google Search results or other data sources. Vertex customers do not, however, receive the FastSearch-ranked web results themselves, only the information from those results. Google limits Vertex in this manner to protect its intellectual property.””

This is on page 35 of the ruling PDF:

Here is Marie’s post: