It starts in the United States to introduce a new shaded section at the top of Google’s search results, containing an automatic summary of any request that has been entered along with links to more information.
This section, generated by Google’s artificial intelligence, previously only appeared if you chose to activate the “Search Generative Experience” (SGE) in the Search Labs platform, but now according to Search Engine Land, Google has started adding the experience for a small percentage of users in the United States. For this reason, the first screenshots are starting to pour in, confirming the novelty, activated in some cases by default. Here’s one shared by Engadget.
The company unveiled the SGE option at the I/O developer conference last May, shortly after it enabled early access to Bard, ChatGPT’s rival AI solution, which was later rebranded as Gemini AI.
As of November, Search Generative Experience was rolled out in 120 countries, but it still required explicit user buy-in. In the meantime, Google has responded to the source, communicating that for these tests they will only show AI-generated summaries if it is sure that they will provide better information than those offered by standard search. Again, Google’s main goal is to get feedback from a wider audience, especially those who didn’t choose to turn on the feature. This will give you a better idea of how generative AI can help those who are not tech-savvy or who are simply not interested in taking advantage of this technology.
For those who have not followed the developments, we remind you that recently Google has had some problems with the generation of images by Gemini, which have often been historically inaccurate and offensive, so much so that it has had to block the function while waiting to apply the necessary corrections. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, has publicly apologized for the incident.