Google on August 15 announced it is extending its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered search experience, AI Overviews, to consumers in India and five other countries including the United Kingdom, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil.
In India, the feature will be available in English and Hindi languages in the coming weeks, along with India-first features such as the ability to listen to search responses and toggle between English and Hindi results, both of which were piloted in the country last year.
This rollout comes more than two months after the search experience was introduced in the United States, following its announcement at the company's annual developer conference Google I/O 2024 on May 14.
At launch, Google stated that it was introducing AI overviews after nearly a year of experimenting with a generative AI-powered search experience called Search Generative Experience (SGE) in a few markets, including India. The feature provides consumers a quick AI-generated summary of a topic along with links to go deeper, at the top of the search results.
At the time, Google mentioned that "hundreds of millions" of users will have access to AI Overviews, and the tech giant expects to make it available to over a billion people by the end of the year.
This launch came as the tech giant seeks to reimagine its flagship search product in the generative AI era, amid renewed competition from rivals such as Microsoft and OpenAI and upstarts such as Perplexity.
The way people engage with information is also changing and is becoming more conversational, as evident by the widespread adoption of AI chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Copilot, and Anthropic's Claude, besides Google's own Gemini.
However, shortly after the rollout, many users started encountering many bizarre and erroneous search responses, such as telling users to eat rocks, and put glue on pizza to help cheese stick better, the screenshots of which were widely shared online.
Subsequently, the search giant stated that it is putting limits on the feature in order to tackle the issue.
On May 30, Google's search head Liz Reid said that the company has built detection mechanisms for "nonsensical queries" that shouldn’t show an AI Overview, and has also limited the inclusion of satire and humor content.
Google has also updated its systems to limit the use of user-generated content in responses that could offer misleading advice and added triggering restrictions for queries where AI Overviews were not proving to be as helpful, she said.
Hema Budaraju, Senior Director, Product Management, Search at Google said in a blog post on August 15 that the company will be rolling out this feature gradually over the course of several weeks, with a focus on "maintaining Search's high bar for information quality"
"Through our testing in these markets, we’ve found that people prefer using Search with AI Overviews, and they find their search results more helpful. In fact, as part of the testing, we've seen that Indian users listen to AI Overviews responses more often than other countries" he said.
Surfacing relevant websites
Budaraju said the company is also testing the addition of links to relevant web pages directly within the text of AI Overviews, making it easier for people to visit websites that interest them.
This measure comes amid concerns raised by web publishers about a potential loss in traffic and revenue. Gartner, a research and consulting firm, predicts traffic to the web from search engines will fall 25 percent by 2026.
Budaraju however stated that the experiment has shown "early, positive results" for the company.
"Showing links to supporting web pages directly within AI Overviews is driving higher traffic to publisher sites. We’ll continue testing different ways of presenting information that’s most helpful for people while prioritizing approaches that drive traffic to relevant websites" he said.
AI Overviews will also start showing a new right-hand link display on the desktop to enable people to browse through relevant websites while they search. This feature will also be accessible for users on mobile devices by tapping the site icons on the top right of the overview window, he said.
Google has previously stated that it will not show AI Overviews for hard news topics, where freshness and factuality are important. Additionally, in the case of certain health topics, the firm has added additional triggering refinements to improve its quality protections.
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