Google’s parent company, Alphabet, announced on Thursday that it is expanding its AI-generated summaries feature, known as AI Overviews, to six additional countries. This follows a disastrous campaign earlier this year where the feature was subjected to a lot of criticism owing to the fact that it was inaccurate.
Google recently introduced the AI Overviews, along with a brief summary of the normal search results, which were first launched in the United States in May last year. However, as it had a trial for almost a year, it was heavily criticized for giving wrong answers. Google then responded to these concerns by altering it to diminish the sorts of queries it would respond to as well as the sources of user-generated content.
Company launches AI summaries in multiple languages
Starting this week, AI Overviews will be provided in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. The summaries will be in local languages, including Portuguese and Hindi. This expansion seeks to take this feature to a wider audience and also respond to some of the concerns that were made earlier.
At the same time, Google is making enhancements to existing AI overviews by adding more hyperlinks to the results. The new feature will also show related websites together with the synthesized output, while internal trials will center on hyperlinking into the main description. These alterations are intended to direct more traffic to sites that are relevant and, therefore optimize the interests of the user and the publisher.
Hema Budaraju, a senior director of products at Google, expressed confidence that the feature has been made better.
“I have enough evidence to say that quality is only improving.”
Hema Budaraju
Google’s analytics indicate that users who use AI Overviews are more satisfied and perform longer, targeted searches in comparison to users who do not use the feature. These insights pay credence to the improvements and extension of the subsequent AI Overviews pursued by the company.
Google implements “three wins” model in feature updates
However, the media industry has raised the concern that AI Overviews are likely to affect ‘referral traffic’ to news sites. These are some of the issues that Google has been trying to fix in recent updates. This includes providing more hyperlinks and making summaries more accurate. Budaraju pointed out that these changes had the advantage of benefiting Google, consumers, and publishers, referred to as the “three wins” model.
The launch of AI Overviews is happening at a time when Google is facing legal and competitive battles. Last week, a US judge declared that Google has an unlawful monopoly on the search market, which opened the way for a trial that may result in the separation of Alphabet.
Currently, federal officials are evaluating whether to consider the unbundling of some segments of Google in the wake of an antitrust ruling by a court. Also, the recent developments by competitors like Microsoft OpenAI threaten Google in the search engine market.
