Google said on August 31 that it is bringing its generative AI-powered search experience to India, as the company seeks to reimagine its core search engine business in the face of renewed competition from rivals such as Microsoft.
Called the Search Generative Experience (SGE), the feature will be available as an opt-in experiment through the company's new Search Labs initiative, which will house all its early-stage experiments in Google Search. The AI-powered experience will be available in English and Hindi through Chrome desktop and the latest version of the Google App on Android and iOS.
Starting today, one can simply tap the Labs icon in the top left corner of the Google app or Chrome desktop to try out this feature. India is the third market where the tech giant is rolling out this feature after first introducing it in the United States in May 2023 and then in Japan earlier this week.
People who opt-in to the experiment will start seeing a new integrated search results page that will start appearing with an AI-generated snapshot on top of search results. This snapshot will display a quick topic summary and links to go deeper into the topic.
Users can also ask a follow-up question or choose one of the suggested questions to enter a new conversational mode. The context will be carried over for each question to help users continue exploring their preferred topic. One can also scroll down to see the traditional search results. Meanwhile, search ads will continue to appear in dedicated ad slots throughout the page with the “Sponsored” label in bold black text.
For instance, a question like “Which is a good beginner trek in Himachal and how to prepare for it?” will show an AI-generated summary on top of search results that pieces information together from various sources along with suggested next steps, wherein one can type in a specific follow-up question or choose queries such as “How to take great photos on a trek?” among others.
"We’re envisioning a supercharged Search that does the heavy lifting for you so you’ll be able to understand a topic faster, uncover new viewpoints and insights, and get things done more easily. The Search Generative Experience is the first step we’re taking in this journey, and part of our vision to make Search radically more helpful" said Puneesh Kumar, General Manager - Google Search, India.
Read: Google is slowly reimagining search in the generative AI era
New India-focused features
The search giant is also introducing a slew of India-focused features within the AI search experience.
Keeping in mind the high adoption of voice search in India, users can tap the ‘Listen’ button to hear the response through Text-To-Speech. Soon, they will be able to tap the microphone icon in conversational mode to ask follow-up questions instead of typing them.
In Hindi-speaking states, people will also see a language toggle that will enable them to switch from an English response to Hindi and vice versa.
Over the next few months, Kumar said they intend to collect feedback and iterate on the experience alongside their users.
Kumar said the AI search experience will not be triggered for all types of queries at the moment, but only the ones where they "have high confidence"
"Over time, we will keep evaluating, iterating and fine tuning so that new query types can also start getting triggered by SGE. At the end of the day, they have to make the experience simpler, smarter and faster for users. So, we will not trigger the SGE experience where we are not able to do that on day one" he said.
Read: Google's AI chatbot Bard now supports 9 Indian languages, adds Lens integration
Kumar also reiterated that this generative AI experience is still an experimental feature, and the company has previously said it will take a deliberate approach in rolling it out to consumers.
That said, this experiment is likely an indication of how the search engine will evolve in the future, as consumer behaviour continues to shift. The way people are engaging with information is changing and becoming more conversational, thanks to recent advancements in generative AI.
Over the past year, Google has also made concerted efforts to make its traditional search experience more visual and interactive for users by combining images, sounds, text, and speech to help them find what they're looking for. India is playing a key role in these efforts, Liz Reid, Vice President, Google Search previously told Moneycontrol in an interview.
In July, during the company's earnings conference call, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said they are in a period of "incredible innovation for Search" that has continuously evolved over the years.
Generative AI "gives us a chance to now not always be constrained in the way Search was working before, allowed us to think outside the box", Pichai said "Over time, this will just be how Search works"
These developments however come at a time when Google's flagship search business is encountering the biggest challenge in over a decade, amid escalated competition from its Big Tech rival Microsoft which is also integrating generative AI capabilities across its suite of products including its search engine Bing.
A key challenge for the company will also be to make the AI search experience faster.
At present, users will see some delay between the search generative experience and the normal results, although the company has rolled out a few changes in the past few weeks that have cut that time by half, thereby making the experience faster and quicker, Kumar said.
"We are building better models and getting more efficient in making the latency much smaller. We also feel that in generating the snapshot, even if it takes a little bit of time to generate, the usefulness to it is much higher for the users and they will find it much smarter, and easier to navigate and work through" he said.
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