Google’s AI Overviews immediately caused a stir when they started appearing in search results earlier this year. Not only are they obtrusive, but they’ve also shared incorrect, and occasionally dangerous, answers, such as putting glue on pizza to make the cheese stick. Google has been working out the kinks ever since, and on Thursday, the company announced a few interesting updates for the controversial Google Search feature.
First, Google is adding a right-hand link display for AI Overviews on desktop that should make it easier to find the sources of the information being generated. You can access the link display on mobile by tapping the site icons at the top of the screen.
Google is also testing adding links to relevant websites directly within the AI Overviews. Rather than having to search for the list of sources, you could just click on the text of the overview itself to be redirected to the site where the information originated.
Unsurprisingly, Google says this experiment has shown positive results. When Google includes links within AI Overviews, it drives higher traffic to publisher sites.
Overviews are also getting two new features for those who opt into the “AI Overviews and more” experiment in Search Labs. The first is the ability to “save” overviews for future reference, so you don’t have to remember the specific search. The second is the ability to simplify the language of an overview if you find it to be too wordy or complex.
Finally, Google is bringing AI Overviews with local language support to six new countries: the United Kingdom, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil.
“We’ll be rolling this expansion out gradually over the course of several weeks, with a focus on maintaining Search’s high bar for information quality,” says Google’s Hema Budaraju. “Through our testing in these markets, we’ve found that people prefer using Search with AI Overviews, and they find their search results more helpful.”
