Google’s AI Overviews goes global, hopefully without the rock-eating suggestions

Google is opening up access to its AI Overviews feature to half a dozen new countries and augmenting the Search tool with some additional options. AI Overviews use the Google Gemini AI models to compose a summary based on the search results of a user’s query. Those summaries will now start to appear to users in the United Kingdom, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil. 

AI Overviews made a splash at Google I/O this year when the tech giant boasted that it would help users understand complex subjects without requiring traveling to multiple websites to find what they were looking for. Google has since claimed that AI Overviews have led to increased engagement with diverse sources on the web and pronounced the experiment a success with the rollout to additional countries. Depending on where the user is located, they will see the summaries in the local language. 

“We extensively test how people respond to updates to Search. Since launching in the U.S., we’ve found people who use AI Overviews use Search more and are more satisfied with their results,” Google explained in a blog post. “People who are looking for help with complex topics are engaging more and keep coming back for AI Overviews. Additionally, we see even higher engagement from younger users, aged 18-24, when they use Search with AI Overviews.”

Google shows a lot of faith in AI Overviews in this expansion. That’s a bit surprising, considering the recent evidence that Google was pulling back a bit on promoting the feature. AI Overviews were not only appearing less often, they were taking up a smaller percentage of the screen. But, opening the door to new languages and locations does imply Google has solved the issue of absurd, incorrect, and even dangerous answers reported by some.

AI Overviews Just for You

As part of the expansion, Google has played with the look of AI Overviews and is testing some new feature ideas. For instance, there’s a new right-hand link display for desktop users to make it easier to see relevant websites while browsing AI Overviews. Those links are visible on mobile devices when you tap on site icons in the upper right part 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 antagonize the companies whose data gets used for the AI summaries, so they hope the hyperlinks will drive more traffic to publisher sites.

On the more experimental side, Google has added two new features to the “AI Overviews and more” part of its Search Labs testing platform. One tool to try out would let you save an AI Overview to look at later. Tapping the new save button beneath an AI Overview allows you to store it and come back to see it as needed. The other test is for simplifying the summary provided by AI Overviews. If the text composed by the AI is hard to follow, you can click on a button to make the language more accessible or easier for someone unfamiliar with the topic to understand. For now, both these tests are only available in the U.S.

Search remains crucial to Google, though in the wake of a recent judicial ruling that the company is violating anti-monopoly laws, that may change. For now, AI enhancement is clearly where the industry is heading, in one form or another. If Google wants to remain the byword for looking things up online, it will need useful AI tools. Whether AI Overviews is the killer app for that purpose is hard to say, though asking that question in Google provided a summary that was very certain it would “lead in AI search features.”

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