When the seas of information are as deep as the ocean, it’s time to set your sail again. In a bid to do just that, GOOGLE recently expanded its AI Overviews, first introduced for US customers, in a way that it will now reach people in Australia and New Zealand. It’s GOOGLE’s sign of sealing the victory in search engine optimisation and expertise. In this article, we’ll look at what GOOGLE’s AI Overviews are focusing on and how this shift is digitalising search.
Hema Budaraju, GOOGLE’s Senior Director of Product Management for Search, explained that AI Overviews are a way to satisfy the core intent of a more complicated or nuanced question, serving as the jumping-off point for users to explore further. ‘By reviewing AI-generated summaries, we’re adding a layer to your search,’ says Budaraju. ‘We don’t want you to stop searching [after] the first click.’
It’s the way that GOOGLE has woven in this AI Overview, into its search engine – slowly and carefully. It’s quality-controlled, in a way that a response on a crowd-sourced site never would be. And it’s truly safe; there’s no way you can and answer each other’s questions, or start arguing, or make despicable and abusive comments as people sometimes do in comment sections. All these are why I think AI Overviews are well-received. The feature is sparsely used but very popular: one group comparing various AI text-summarisation services reported that it’s ‘the generation below the age of 24 who are most active, with a usage rate of about 16 per cent’.
Following a period of rigorous testing and its initial release in the US, GOOGLE’s AI Overviews are now emigrating, making their usefulness felt in more than 100 countries. This global reach isn’t about expanding GOOGLE’s user base. It’s about ensuring a consistent search output in languages from English and Hindi to Indonesian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish.
GOOGLE’s investment in better quality AI Overviews can be seen by its response to some early criticisms, as well as in the jokes circulated on social media. As GOOGLE rejiggers its algorithms and removes inaccuracies, it builds its reputation. The search company builds its brand by showing that it is always improving on previous versions.
Another top finding is that users have more time on the sites they land on from an AI Overview – they’re apparently reading the page more intently, thanks to a helpful AI Overview pointing them to a page that offers a quality read. Hopefully, we’ll soon get data from search engines and AI tools that bears this out. I suspect that AI Overviews will also lead to more educated reading in the long term.
But given that GOOGLE’s AI Overviews have started turning up in digital searches around the world, it isn’t difficult to imagine coming scenarios. Just a few years hence, we might expect such AI Overviews to become the default, a new type of search result. In the coming years, only time will tell if and how we will interact with our online searches. But one thing seems clear: GOOGLE is pushing the boundaries of what a search might mean and, if their recent advances are anything to go by, informative and engaging search results will only continue to grow.
It is not just a search engine: it is a knowledge institution with the goal of rendering ‘the world’s information universally accessible and useful’. So, while the introduction of AI Overviews into search represents a mere feature for individual, isolated search experiences, it also stands, by extension, for a completely new way of experiencing and making sense of the world as a whole, and of rendering that experience and knowledge coherent and accessible for everybody. This would be a significant transformation of our information-access experience, and possibly the beginning of a positively hyperconnected global community.
However, another way to view GOOGLE’s expansion of AI Overviews is that, in addition to advancing an AI technology, one is also at the start of a new frontier of digital communication. And everything that users around the globe will encounter during the initial months of experimenting with this feature will, I hope, be some of the first moments of this new generation of search: more natural, more complete and, in the end, more human. If ever there was an opportunity to harness the power of AI with human curiosity, it might just be the right time to capitalise on it. By unlocking the unrealised potentials of the web and making each search a portal, it might finally be possible to transcend the mindless churn of the algorithmic-industrial complex and begin a new conversation.
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