Written by Kenrick Cai
SAN FRANCISCO – Google parent Alphabet (NASDAQ: ) said Thursday it is expanding its AI-powered summaries of search queries to six new countries, just two months after it rolled back some capabilities following a troubled launch.
The search giant made AI Overview — which is displayed on the search results page before regular Web links — available to all US users in May after spending one year testing an earlier limited version.
The feature was popularized after screenshots of fake answers circulated across the internet, such as a pizza recipe showing glue as an ingredient and an answer saying former US President Barack Obama is Muslim.
Google acknowledged the “irregular and erroneous overview” and announced product updates in a blog post in late May. These updates added restrictions on where questions would show AI answers and restricted user-generated content from websites like Reddit from serving as a source of answers.
“I have enough evidence to say that the quality is improving,” Hema Budaraju, Google's senior product director told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday. He pointed to data collected internally by Google, which showed that users with access to the feature reported higher levels of satisfaction and searched for longer queries than users who did not.
AI Overview is now coming to Brazil, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico and Britain, in local languages such as Hindi and Portuguese.
Google also adds links to this feature. Websites will be displayed on the right side of the AI generated response. The company is also testing an additional update that could add links directly within the overview text.
The updates come amid concerns expressed by the media industry about the possibility of losing referral traffic from consumers who clicked on publishers' websites. Budaju said the new update will be a “three-way win” for Google, consumers and publishers.
Last week, a US judge ruled that Google had an illegal search monopoly, paving the way for a lawsuit that could force Alphabet to break up. AI advances from competitors such as Microsoft-backed OpenAI may pose an even greater threat.
