Google Search Is Getting An AI Upgrade Soon

Google Search Is Getting An AI Upgrade Soon

Google has dipped its toes into integrating its AI capabilities into the search engine for a while now, and it has operated under the name of “Search Generative Experience” (SGE). This remained an experimental feature – not anymore, as the company announced via Google I/O that it is officially part of Search with a new name: AI Overview.

You should be able to see the change soon enough (though users in the US will get it first), and if you do, you should be able to see a dedicated section right on top of the results for certain queries. Google’s Head of Search, Liz Reid, told The Verge: “It can take a bunch of the hard work out of searching, so you can focus on the parts you want to do to get things done, or on the parts of exploring that you find exciting.”

The idea is to consolidate multiple tabs of search results into one – say you’re planning a trip, it’ll generate a full plan laid out for easy reference, so you spend less time jumping between different tabs for a specific part of the trip research. All of this is powered by Google’s Gemini AI model, though in this case the model is custom-tuned to even generate a results page with appropriate UI elements.

Of course, not everything needs AI (something that I wholeheartedly agree with), and Google has taken note of that to make sure the AI doesn’t show up when it’s not needed. Say you’re just searching for a webpage or just need to quickly do a math calculation, those are the stuff that AI is simply not needed. In such cases, the search results will appear as normal. But if you’re asking a factual question, AI can step in and provide answers with complexities ranging from ELI5 (short for Explain Like I’m 5) to highly detailed explanations, as seen above.

Pokdepinion: I do feel like it may end up cluttering the page or get too intrusive – hopefully there’s a way to fall back to good old Google Search.