Google’s AI Overviews is going global, hopefully without the rock-eating suggestions
Google is opening up access to its AI Overviews feature to a half-dozen new countries and expanding the Search tool with a number of additional options. AI Overviews uses Google Gemini AI models to compile a summary based on the search results of a user’s query. Those summaries are now being shown to users in the UK, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil.
AI Overviews made waves at Google I/O this year when the tech giant boasted that it would help users understand complex topics without having to travel to multiple websites to find what they were looking for. Google has since claimed that AI Overviews have led to increased engagement with diverse resources across the web and called the experiment a success, rolling it out to additional countries. Depending on where the user is located, they’ll see summaries in the local language.
“We’re testing extensively how people respond to updates to Search. Since launching in the US, we’ve found that people who use AI Overviews use Search more often and are happier with their results,” Google explained in a blog post. “People looking for help with complex topics are more engaged and keep coming back to AI Overviews. We’re also seeing even higher engagement from younger users, ages 18-24, when they use Search with AI Overviews.”
Google is showing a lot of confidence in AI Overviews with this expansion. That’s a bit surprising, given recent evidence that Google has been pulling back on promoting the feature. Not only did AI Overviews appear less frequently, they also took up a smaller percentage of the screen. But opening the door to new languages and locations does imply that Google has solved the problem of absurd, incorrect, and even dangerous answers that some have reported.
AI overviews especially for you
As part of the expansion, Google has been playing with the look of AI Overviews and testing out a few new feature ideas. For example, there’s a new right-hand side display of links for desktop users, making it easier to see relevant websites while browsing AI Overviews. Those links will appear on mobile devices when you tap site icons in the upper-right corner of the screen. The company is also testing embedding links within the text of the summary produced by AI Overviews. Google doesn’t want to offend the companies whose data feeds into the AI summaries, so it hopes the hyperlinks will drive more traffic to publishers’ sites.
On the more experimental side, Google has added two new features to the “AI Overviews and more” section of its Search Labs testing platform. One tool to try out is to save an AI Overview to view later. Tapping the new Save button beneath an AI Overview lets you save it and come back to it later. The other test is to simplify the summary provided by AI Overviews. If the text composed by the AI is difficult to follow, you can click a button to make the language more accessible or easier to understand for someone unfamiliar with the topic. For now, both tests are only available in the US.
Search remains a vital part of Google’s business, though that could change following a recent court ruling that the company violated anti-monopoly laws . For now, AI enhancement is clearly where the industry is headed, in whatever form that takes. If Google wants to remain synonymous with looking things up online, it needs useful AI tools. Whether AI Overviews is the killer app for that purpose is hard to say, though asking that question in Google yielded a summary that was pretty confident it would “lead the way in AI search.”