Google Search is the cornerstone of just about everyone’s online experience. Often it’s the first thing you see when you boot up your computer in the morning, and the first thing you turn to on your phone when planning trips, asking questions, or looking for recommendations.
The well-known search engine company has already shown its chops in the field of artificial intelligence google bardtalkative rival chatbot to OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT. Now, Google plans to update its search experience with AI, and you can try it out for yourself if you’ve signed up to the tech giant’s “Search Labs” testing platform.
With Google’s AI-powered “generative search experience” (announced earlier this year at Google I/O, abbreviated to SGE), you post a question in the search bar and receive AI-generated answers about the topic, photos, and other relevant information from internet. So instead of seeing the first few results from different websites or platforms as you normally would, you first get the AI-generated results in a kind of short summary and then you can scroll down to find the usual results.
But how can this new form of Googling – an activity literally included in most dictionaries right now – improve our online search experiences? Google has broken down three ways SGE will make a big difference; let’s see.
1. See it to understand
The official blog provides an example of how visual results will be improved by the new search feature. If you search for ‘smallest birds of prey’, you will first get pictures of the cute little birds, the generated text response and relevant links below. Previously, you had to navigate to a different page for images and go to an entirely new website to receive up-to-date information.
2. Faster AI powered overviews
With a new search engine layout, Google plans to cut AI response time in half with a recent one improvement so you get results much faster. If you’re looking for cleaning advice, a place to eat lunch, or manuals, you want that information fast. AI-generated answers can help reduce the time spent searching for answers to your question.
3. Learn more about what interests you
Google describes SGE as a “starting point for exploring useful information” and will include links to actual search results with every AI review. They will add publication dates to these links to make sure you stay updated. In other words, SGE helps ensure you don’t run into outdated information and provides in-context AI-curated resources for further reading.
4. Receive instant product recommendations
Don’t get us wrong: if you want a well-curated list of product reviews (for example, a ranking of the best laptops), you generally want to go to a real website. But SGE can give you a sort of summary of these best-of lists; search for a specific product you want to buy – Google suggests ‘peel and stick wallpaper for kitchen’ – and SGE can generate a list of the best options with links to retailers, along with a FAQ about the product you’re looking for. It’s a potentially useful alternative for Internet users who aren’t sure which sites to trust.