Google is expanding AI Overviews, the feature that summarizes answers to complex questions from around the internet and displays them at the top of traditional search results, to six more countries starting Thursday – India, Japan, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil and the United Kingdom – supporting local languages in addition to English.
That’s less than three months after AI Overviews launched in the U.S. and promptly encouraged people to eat rocks and put glue on their pizzas. Introducing this method to millions more people raises the question: How can we prevent another glued pizza fiasco in a foreign country?
“It’s a challenging area,” Hema Budaraju, senior director of product management for search at Google, said in an interview with Engadget. “Understanding quality across the web and across all these languages is a difficult problem, and integrating LLMs (large language models) is not easy. Using AI to better understand languages is pretty important.”
To prevent a sticky pizza-like situation, such as in Hindi or Japanese, Google said it conducted language-specific testing of AI Overviews as well as red teaming, a technique used in the tech industry to stress test how systems might behave when attacked by malicious actors. “We are focused on addressing potential issues, and we are committed to listening and acting quickly,” Budaraju said. In May, following the outlandish response to AI Overviews, Google introduced additional safeguards, such as limiting the inclusion of satirical and humorous content and restricting the types of queries that triggered the feature in the first place.
In addition to expanding the feature to more countries, Google is making another big change to AI Overviews: links to sources will now be prominently displayed on the right side of each AI-generated answer, making it easier for users to click to the actual website the answer came from. And for a small percentage of users, links will also be added directly in the text of AI Overviews. If rolled out more widely, this move could allay publishers’ concerns about losing traffic to AI reading the web for users and reduce the need to click to the actual web pages.
“This experiment has shown initial positive results and we are able to generate more traffic with links directly in the text,” said Budaraju.
Users who sign up to Search Labs, the company’s platform for testing out upcoming features before their general release, can also try out some additional features – the ability to “save” a specific AI summary for future reference, as well as an option to simplify the language of an AI-generated answer, something Google previewed earlier this year.
Update, August 15, 2024, 12:50 PM ET: This story has been updated to clarify that links in the text of AI summaries are available to a small percentage of users, not just those enrolled in Search Labs.
