 "Alphabet boosts profits, overtakes Apple in value")
Google acknowledged the “strange and erroneous previews” and announced product updates in a blog post in late May.
Google parent company Alphabet said Thursday it is expanding its AI-generated summaries for search queries to six new countries, just two months after removing some features following a troubled launch.
The search giant made AI previews — which appear at the top of a search results page before traditional links to the web — available to all U.S. users in May after spending a year testing a limited earlier version.
The feature was widely criticized after screenshots of factually inaccurate responses circulated online, such as a pizza recipe that listed glue as an ingredient and a response that incorrectly stated that former U.S. President Barack Obama is Muslim.
Google acknowledged the “strange and erroneous previews” and announced product updates in a blog post in late May.
These updates added restrictions on which queries would display AI responses and prevented user-generated content from websites like Reddit from serving as source material for responses.
“I have enough evidence to say that the quality is only getting better,” Hema Budaraju, Google’s senior product manager, told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday.
She referred to data collected by Google internally, which shows that users with access to the feature reported higher satisfaction levels and conducted longer and more specific searches than users who did not have access to it.
AI Overviews is now coming to Brazil, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico and Great Britain, in local languages such as Portuguese and Hindi.
Google is also adding more hyperlinks to this feature.
Websites will be displayed on the right side of the AI generated response.
The company is also internally testing a new update that would add links directly into the preview text, as part of an effort to “prioritize approaches that drive traffic to relevant websites,” it said in a blog post published Thursday.
The updates come amid concerns that the media industry has been raising for more than a year that AI-powered search could cost media companies referral traffic to their sites. Budaraju said the new update would have a “triple benefit” for Google, consumers and publishers.
Last week, a U.S. judge ruled that Google had an illegal monopoly on search, setting the stage for a lawsuit that could force Alphabet to be broken up. Advances in artificial intelligence from rivals like Microsoft-backed OpenAI could pose an even greater threat.
(Only the headline and image of this report may have been reworked by Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
First published: August 15, 2024 | 9:51 p.m. IST
