Google, at its annual I/O developers conference, announced AI Overviews will first roll out to all US users in Google Search and will launch in more countries soon and be available to more than a billion users by the end of the year.
The company has been testing AI-powered Overviews through its Search Generative Experience since last year. “We’ve heard that users find search more helpful than ever. At this point, we’ve served billions of queries. And what we hear again and again is that people like this combination of insights, mixed with the ability to dive deeper to hear from human perspectives and different authoritative sources,” said Liz Reid, Google’s vice-president of search.
It generates information summaries above traditional search results. In other words, it offers a general sense of the answer to your query along with links to resources for more information. Combine this with a new feature in Lens that lets you search by capturing a video. Equally important is a new planning tool designed to generate, say, a trip itinerary based on a single query. And a new AI-powered way to organise the results page itself. It means if you look for restaurants, the results may offer options for date night as well as a bunch of options for a business meeting without you even having to ask. All this can change the way we look at search.
Lately, there has been criticism about AI-powered search changing the way the web works and how it may affect journalism. AI Overviews, for example, may increase concerns that web publishers will see less traffic from Google Search. On Google, users will see longer summaries about a topic, which indirectly means users may not want to visit many websites.
But Google has downplayed those concerns. “The links included in AI Overviews get more clicks” from users than if they were presented as traditional search results, Reid wrote in a blog post. “We’ll continue to focus on sending valuable traffic to publishers and creators.”
You won’t see AI Overviews for all your searches. It will be there to answer complex questions where Google feels it can add value beyond the search results.
The changes are coming close on the heels of OpenAI’s announcements. The San Francisco-based start-up’s ChatGPT chatbot offers complete answers to many questions. It is a likely threat to search results that provide a traditional list of links alongside advertising. On Monday, OpenAI made a veiled attempt to upstage Google’s announcements by demonstrating a faster and cheaper version of the model that powers ChatGPT, which can interpret voice, video, images and code in a single interface.
Google has also highlighted other new or improved AI products, like Veo, which generates video from text prompts; Imagen 3 can create pictures; and Lyria is for AI music generation.
Subscribers to Gemini Advanced will be able to create personalised chatbots called “Gems” to help with specific tasks. And updated: Google’s flagship Gemini 1.5 Pro model with a larger context window of two million tokens (or the amount of data it can refer to while generating a response).
