3 new things you can do with generative AI in Search

Aug 02, 2023

[[read-time]] min read

Updates to AI-powered overviews give you easier and more visual ways to find and digest information.

Hema Budaraju

Senior Director, Product Management, Search

Stylized image of a Search query box and imagery from the new generative AI experience.

The web is home to a huge range of information and perspectives. Within this sea of content, we want to make it faster and easier to find what you're looking for.

With our generative AI powered Search experience (SGE), you can quickly get up to speed on a new topic, uncover quick tips for your specific questions or discover products and things to consider — with article links to dig deeper. We’re constantly working to improve this experience in ways big and small. Here are three recent updates that make SGE even more helpful.

1. Get a better understanding through images and videos

Sometimes, it’s more powerful to understand something by seeing it — so we recently brought images to even more AI-powered overviews. For example, when you search for something like “tiniest birds of prey,” you’ll quickly be able to reference what the bird looks like and get relevant information from the web. And over the next week, you’ll begin to see videos within some overviews where it’s helpful to see something in motion, such as a demonstration of a yoga pose, or how to get stains out of marble.

Animated image showing a video in an AI overview in response to someone searching for "can you get stains out of marble."

2. Get your AI-powered overviews, faster

Whether you’re simply looking for somewhere to grab lunch nearby or researching something more complex, like how to upgrade your apartment on a budget, we know you want your information quickly. We recently made a major improvement that reduces the time it takes to generate AI overviews by half – and we're continually improving so you'll see even faster responses over time.

3. Learn more when something catches your interest

SGE is designed to be a jumping-off point for exploring helpful information on the web, with links to search results included alongside each AI overview. To help you better understand how recent the information is from these web pages, we recently added publish dates to links. And we’re continuing to experiment with new, easier ways for people to find web pages that support information in AI overviews.

As we’ve shared, in this experience, Search ads will continue to appear in dedicated ad slots throughout the page. You can find and test out this experiment today in Search Labs in the Google app (Android and iOS), or on Chrome desktop.

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