Two months after rolling back some features after a troubled debut, Google parent Alphabet announced on Thursday that it was extending its AI-generated summaries for search queries to six more countries.
After testing a limited previous version for a year, the search giant made AI Overviews—which appear at the top of a search results page before conventional links to the Web—available to all U.S. users in May.
The feature received a lot of backlash after photos of factually incorrect responses went viral online.
Examples of these included an incorrect answer declaring that former US President Barack Obama is Muslim and a pizza recipe that included glue as an ingredient.
In a blog post published in late May, Google recognized the “odd and erroneous overviews” and announced product changes.
These modifications limited the queries for which AI responses would be displayed and restricted the usage of user-generated information from websites like Reddit as the basis for answers.
Hema Budaraju, a senior director of products at Google, told reporters on Wednesday “I have enough evidence to say that quality is only improving.”
She cited internal data from Google that demonstrated that users with access to the feature were more satisfied and used lengthier, more targeted searches than those without.
With local languages like Hindi and Portuguese, AI Overviews is now available in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, and the United Kingdom.
Additionally, Google is expanding the feature’s hyperlink count. Websites will appear to the right of the response produced by AI.
Laptops 1000As part of an attempt to “prioritize approaches that drive traffic to relevant websites,” the business is also internally testing an additional update that would include links directly inside the text of the overview.
This information was released in a blog post on Thursday.
The announcement of the improvements coincides with worries expressed by the media sector for over a year on the potential loss of referral traffic to media companies’ websites due to the AI-generated search tool.
According to Budaraju, there would be “three-way benefits” from the new update for Google, users, and publishers.
