Google is making some changes to its AI Overviews, after the artificial intelligence-driven search feature gave what the company calls “odd and erroneous” responses to people’s online searches.
AI Overviews were introduced last month at Google’s annual I/O developer conference. Now, when people use Google Search to find information on certain topics, a box of AI-generated text appears at the top of the search results, annotated with links to external websites. Traditional search results appear below the AI Overviews, marking a major shift in how Google presents information.
According to a blog post from Google VP Liz Reid, AI Overviews results are generated using the company’s large language model (LLM), Gemini, and are designed for instances when someone wants to “get both a quick overview of a topic and links to learn more.”
Google technology expert Alex Joseph told ABC Audio that AI Overviews is able to field more complex questions than a traditional Google Search.
“With an AI Overview what [Google] can really do is synthesize a lot of information and get you the answer that you’re looking for very quickly,” said Joseph.
Instead of presenting users with pages of links to comb though, Joseph said, AI Overviews streamlines the process by summarizing information and providing users with a concise answer.
“They’ll have less friction, they won’t have to click through to a number of different websites, which can often be quite a bit of a bugbear if you just want some information very quickly,” notes Chris Stokel-Walker, technology journalist and author of the book “How AI Ate the World: A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence – and Its Long Future.”
