Google is expanding its experiment with AI-generated answers ahead of search results to Britain – a new way to find answers or a misstep?
Google continues its experimentation with its best-known core product, Google Search, with tests of AI-generated answers appearing before the usual list of results. It started by trialling its new plan on a limited number of results in the US, and is now expanding the trial to Britain.
The idea is for Google to provide AI-generated, comprehensive written answers, providing an ‘overview’ at the top of selected search results. In the initial testing phase, this will only be visible to a small number of UK users signed into their Google accounts when using Search.
The AI-generated summaries will only appear as part of certain search results, with Google now having a better idea based on previous testing – which the company claims users found useful. Hema Budaraju, Google’s senior director of Search Generative Experience (SGE) and one of the key drivers behind Google’s generative AI search efforts, spoke to the BBC about Google’s efforts and gave the example of “how to remove stains on painted walls” as an example where users found the response generated helpful.
Google’s intentions in the future
This SGE experiment started almost a year ago when Google allowed users to sign up to try out the new search experience via Google Labs. Users had to sign up and often wait a while for their chance to try out Google’s newly suggested search results. That is, until recently, when Google decided to start showing AI-generated results to a small portion of US user results without users opting in, and the development will now be trialled with a “small portion” of Google’s traffic of logged in users. in the United Kingdom.
A major problem that Google and other tech companies need to consider when it comes to generative AI models is that it’s difficult to prioritize answers that are both human-sounding and completely factual. They can (and have been known to) generate content that may be offensive, harmful, biased, or simply inaccurate.
Ms Budaraju stated that Google is focused on continuing to deliver ‘information quality’ and would take ‘great care and attention to do so in a responsible manner’. She provided reassurance, saying that Google is taking an approach that will produce more limited answers, even at the expense of fluency, to prioritize accuracy in search results.
She explained that if there weren’t enough high-quality resources on a given topic, Google Search would likely not generate an AI response for questions related to it.
She also confirmed that Google is approaching this as an experiment and welcomes feedback from users if they encounter unsatisfactory results. “We will find issues of bias and safety, but the stakes are to find them and then invest in improving them,” she told the BBC.
What the future of Search looks like
Google is not the first technology company to integrate AI into its search engine. Microsoft is introducing its Copilot AI chatbot and assistant to Bing, which aims to become as fundamental to the overall user experience as many of its other core products.
Naturally, publishers and other companies that create online content are concerned about how this will impact traffic to their websites. If users’ curiosity and questions are satisfied with the longer SGE text answers, they may not feel the need to do further research and check the actual websites where Google gets its information from. Personally, I would always urge you to check the information that generative AI tools produce. That’s why I think it would be great if the SGE results had consistent links to sources.
Ms Budaraju again assured those concerned about traffic to their sites that the new search results would continue to serve links and ads, reinforcing Google’s denial that it was considering an ad-free search experience. She said that Google would place importance on sending traffic to creators, even stating that the AI results actually offered users a wider range of resources to view. She followed this up by claiming that Google’s new approach actually resulted in users clicking on a greater number of resources than before.
Google has apparently seen a positive reception to its AI search results experiments from users so far, but it’s still early days. The AI-generated responses were only shown to a proverbial handful of users relative to the number of people who use Google Search every day. If and when Google adopts this as a standard practice when it comes to search, it will likely face new challenges. I hope Google will consider adopting (or at least opting out of) this new style of search opt-in. Although, who knows? Google has decades of knowledge and experience building products that make users part of their daily lives. Maybe this is also true.