Google’s AI Overview is coming to a search results page near you, whether you want it to or not. The company announced on Monday that it is expanding the AI feature to more than 100 countries around the world.
Google debuted AI Overview, which uses generative AI to summarize the key points of your search topic and display that information at the top of the results page, to mixed reviews in May before subsequently expanding the program in August.
Monday’s rollout sees the feature made available in seven languages — English, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish — to all U.S. users who meet the age requirements as well as global users who sign up for the “AI Overviews and more” experiment in Search Labs (you can find a full list of covered countries here).
AI Overview was first announced at Google I/O 2023 and originally was known as the Search Generative Experience. After spending a year as part of the company’s experimental Labs test bed, Google made Overview its default search experience in May 2024. Users were equally skeptical and critical of the new system, which provided dangerous and incorrect information to users, advising them on how many rocks to eat each day and reportedly telling them to add “about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness” and help prevent cheese from sliding off their pizzas.
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— SG-r01 (@heavenrend) May 22, 2024
Despite its initial validity issues, Google pushed ahead in August, expanding the Overview feature to cover six additional countries: the U.K., India, Japan, Indonesia, Brazil, and Mexico. “With AI Overviews, we’re seeing that people have been visiting a greater diversity of websites for help with more complex questions,” the company wrote at the time. “And when people click from search result pages with AI Overviews, these clicks are higher quality for websites — meaning users are more likely to spend more time on the sites they visit.”
In October, the program took “another big leap forward,” according to the company, incorporating paid ads into its results, as well as enabling users to leverage Lens and ask questions about the moving objects within a given video clip. Not only does Lens provide links to visually similar products, it also provides reviews of the specific product you’re searching for, providing price comparisons and information on where to make the purchase.
Whether AI Overview ultimately revolutionizes search, as Google claims it will, or it becomes the next Microsoft Clippy, a feature so universally loathed by its user base that we’re still talking about how bad it was more than two decades after it was removed from Office, remains to be seen.
