Google brings AI answers in Search to new countries

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters): Google parent Alphabet said on Thursday it was expanding its AI-generated summaries for search queries to six new countries, just two months after it rolled back some capabilities following a problem-riddled launch.

The search giant made AI Overviews – which are displayed atop a search results page before traditional links to the Web – available to all U.S. users in May after spending one year trialing a limited earlier version.

The feature was widely panned after screenshots of factually inaccurate answers circulated across the internet, such as a pizza recipe that listed glue as an ingredient and an answer wrongly stating that former U.S. President Barack Obama is Muslim.

Google acknowledged the “odd and erroneous overviews” and announced updates to the product in a blog post in late May. These updates added restrictions to which queries would display AI answers and curbed user-generated content from websites like Reddit from serving as source material for answers.

“I have enough evidence to say that quality is only improving,” Hema Budaraju, a senior director of product at Google, told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday.

She pointed to data Google collects internally, which showed that users with access to the feature reported higher levels of satisfaction and searched for longer, more specific queries than users who did not.

AI Overviews is now coming to the Brazil, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico and Britain, in local languages such as Portuguese and Hindi.

Google is also adding more hyperlinks to the feature. Websites will be displayed to the right side of the AI-generated answer.

The company is also internally testing a further update that would add links directly within the text of the overview, part of an effort “prioritizing approaches that drive traffic to relevant websites,” it said in a Thursday blog post.

The updates come amid concerns the media industry has been voicing for more than a year about the possibility that the AI-generated search feature could cost media companies referral traffic to their sites. Budaraju said the new update would have a “three-way benefit” for Google, consumers and publishers.

Last week a U.S. judge ruled Google had an illegal monopoly on search, clearing the way for a trial that could force the breakup of Alphabet. AI advances from rivals like Microsoft-backed OpenAI could pose an even bigger threat.