By Kenrick Kay
SAN FRANCISCO — Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) said Thursday it is expanding its artificial intelligence-generated summaries of search queries to six new countries, just two months after rolling back some capabilities following a troubled launch.
The search giant made its AI Overviews feature — which is displayed at the top of a search results page before traditional links to the web — available to all users in the US in May after spending a year in a limited previous trial.
The feature has been widely criticized after screenshots of inaccurate answers circulated online, such as a pizza recipe that listed glue as an ingredient, and an answer claiming former US President Barack Obama is Muslim.
Google acknowledged “strange and incorrect public reviews” and announced product updates in a blog post in late May. The updates added restrictions on which queries would return AI answers and curbed user-generated content from websites like Reddit from serving as a source of material for answers.
“I have enough evidence to say that the quality is only getting better,” Hema Budaraju, a Google product manager, told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday. She pointed to data Google collects internally that showed users with access to the feature reported higher levels of satisfaction and searched for longer queries than users who didn’t.
The AI Overviews app is now available in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, and the UK, in local languages like Hindi and Portuguese.
Google is also working on adding hyperlinks to the feature. Websites will be displayed on the right side of the AI-generated answer. The company is also internally testing another update that would add direct links within the overview text.
The updates come amid concerns in the media industry about the potential loss of referral traffic from consumers who clicked on publishers’ sites. Budaraju said the new update would deliver a “triple win” for Google, consumers and publishers.
Last week, a U.S. judge ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly on search, paving the way for a trial that could force Alphabet to break up. And advances in artificial intelligence from rivals like Microsoft-backed OpenAI could pose a bigger threat.