Whoop-de-doo.
Put on your sturdiest boots, because the decades-long part of our internet journey over dry land is over. Now it’s time to knuckle down and trudge through an endless bog of AI slop.
That’s because Google, our tech overlords whose search engine is basically the connective tissue of the entire surface web, has announced that it’s going to expand its infamously terrible and ad-inundated AI Overviews feature — the big unsolicited box that appears above real search results, presenting machine-generated summaries of information, some of it real and some totally fake.
With the powers of Google’s latest AI model Gemini 2.0, the Overviews are getting beefed up so they can start answering tougher, technical questions about math and coding — along with other tweaks we’ll get into in a minute.Â
But the biggest change Google announced is a brand new — but currently experimental — “AI Mode,” which more or less completely replaces search results with responses from Gemini. Say goodbye to those familiar website links, and say hello to snappy, “smart brevity”-style answers to all your dying questions, which may or may not be hallucinated nonsense.
Google claims that users asked for AI responses for even more of their searches, and it has gladly obliged to upgrade the slop trough. Exclusively available to users subscribed to the “Google One AI Premium” plan, the AI mode is integrated as a new tab at the top of the Google app. The page it opens is solely dedicated to AI responses; scrolling to the bottom won’t eventually produce the classic list of web links. No — it’s chatbot ramblings all the way down, baby.
Popular chatbots are already probed like search engines by users, and some AI companies have released versions that are tailor-made for looking stuff up, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT Search. But Google, as the dominant company in the space, puts such AI capabilities straight at the fingertips of the countless millions of users in its ecosystem, who’ve likely already grown accustomed to large language model responses via the AI Overviews.
To refine Gemini for search inquiries, Google says the model uses a “query fan-out” technique that supposedly covers more ground than a traditional search. When asked a question, the AI will make “multiple related searches concurrently across subtopics and multiple data sources and then brings those results together to provide an easy-to-understand response,” explained Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google Search, in the announcement.
“We aim to show an AI-powered response as much as possible,” Stein added, “but in cases where we don’t have high confidence in helpfulness and quality, the response will be a set of web search results.”
As for the rinky-dink AI Overviews, don’t expect them to go anywhere in the meantime. Google says that now, even signed-out users will be shown the search summaries.
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