Google's AI Overviews are rolling out to over 100 more countries today, including Australia and New Zealand, bringing the algorithmically generated search summaries to millions more users five months after its US launch. It seems pretty safe to say the search giant considers the feature a success.
"We can actually do better than what's on your Search page," Hema Budaraju, Google's Senior Director of Product Management for Search, told Mashable.
Rather than completely replace your standard Google Search, Budaraju stated that AI Overviews are intended to be a "jumping off point" for further investigation, quickly addressing questions that are more complex, nuanced, or have no immediate answer. As such, they may not appear for more straightforward questions which are satisfactorily answered by the Search results page.
"We add AI Overviews where we believe that it has additional value," said Budaraju.
Noting that AI Overviews have been tested "extensively," Budaraju emphasised that Google focused on Search quality and safety, implementing extra precautions concerning important topics such as health information.
"For us, quality and responsibility is very important to the system," said Budaraju. "And some of it is learning — learning very actively through our users and learning very actively through our system."
According to Google, its testing has shown that users find search results with AI Overviews more helpful, and that younger people aged 18 to 24 have higher engagement with the feature. Users are reportedly staying longer on websites when they do click through as well. Hopefully this means people are being vigilant about thoroughly double-checking any information they're served with authoritative sources.
AI Overviews will be rolling out globally in the coming weeks, and will be available in all currently supported languages regardless of the country users access the feature from. At present, Google's AI Overviews are available in English, Hindi, Indonesia, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Google initially launched AI Overviews for U.S. users in May, and was very quickly met with both jokes and criticism. Users posted screenshots of incorrect AI-generated summaries on social media (some of which were wrong to a dangerous extent), while Mashable's testing found that AI Overviews were generally "a little worse" than standard Google Searches.
Though Google claimed that "a very large number" of screenshots were faked, the company did state that it was working to address issues with AI Overviews via improving its algorithms and removing erroneous responses.
Such improvements were apparently enough that Google felt comfortable rolling out AI Overviews to the UK, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil in August. It also updated the AI Overview interface, more prominently displaying relevant websites on the right side of the page instead of below the generated summary. With today's rollout, millions more will now have access to Google's AI-generated search summaries.
