Bad press be damned, Google is reportedly committing even harder to its AI-powered search aspirations, announcing improvements to its AI Overview system and testing a new AI Mode in search.
Google’s initial foray into AI-powered search didn’t exactly go as planned. When the popular search engine initially launched AI Overviews, users received some troubling answers to their queries, from health tips on eating rocks to pizza recipes that included glue.
Now, though, with an injection of new software, Google plans to bring even more AI features to the search experience, whether you like it or not.
Even More AI Overviews Are Coming to Google
According to an announcement from the company in a blog post, Google is going to show AI Overviews for more and more queries in the near future, with a specific focus on “coding, advanced math, and multimodal queries,” with more advancements on the way.
As the announcement points out, this is made possible by Gemini 2.0, the most recently updated version of the generative AI technology, which can provide “faster and higher quality responses and show AI Overviews more often for these types of queries.”
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That’s not all, either. Google is also making AI Overviews more accessible to every day users. You will not longer have to be signed into your Google account to receive these AI Overviews in search, and the feature is not longer restricted for teen users.
New AI Mode in Google Search
Beyond the more prevalent AI Overviews across Google Search, the big tech firm is also experimenting with a new way to search called AI Mode. The new system is designed to provide more in-depth answers and allow for follow-up questions, so you can use more advanced reasoning in your online search.
“Helping people discover content from the web remains central to our approach, and with AI Mode we’re making it easy for people to explore and take action. With the model’s deep information retrieval, people can better express what they’re looking for — with all their nuances and constraints — and get to the right web content in a range of formats.” – Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google Search
You can opt in to use the new AI mode in Google search via Google Labs. However, it’s not quite ready for everyone just yet, with this writer receiving a “Search Labs isn’t available for your account right now” message when trying to access the new tool.
Google Wants AI at the Forefront
Google has been playing second fiddle to OpenAI since the generative AI revolution started a few years ago, with ChatGPT still remaining the clear favorite when it comes to chatbot functionality. Still, Google clearly has the edge on search traffic, with decades of usage by billions around the world.
Subsequently, it makes sense that Google is trying to pin its AI success to the search engine. After all, with 8.5 billion searches per day, Google could quickly become the AI favorite if the search engine becomes a functional AI tool.
That has been the hang up, though. AI-powered search on Google has been nothing if not a mixed bag of results, with users pointing to inaccurate and unhelpful answers as a serious flaw. Hopefully this injection of Gemini 2.0 has an impact, but if Google isn’t careful, it could suffer yet another bad press cycle due to its lagging AI system.
