Google Search Gets AI-Powered 'Snapshots'

"The AI takeover of Google Search starts now," writes The Verge's David Pierce. At Google I/O today, the company demoed a new opt-in feature called Search Generative Experience (SGE). The new experience generates AI "snapshots" that appear at the top of the search results page consisting of an AI-generated summary about your query, with links to sources of information and shopping. From the report: To demonstrate, Liz Reid, Google's VP of Search, flips open her laptop and starts typing into the Google search box. "Why is sourdough bread still so popular?" she writes and hits enter. Google's normal search results load almost immediately. Above them, a rectangular orange section pulses and glows and shows the phrase "Generative AI is experimental." A few seconds later, the glowing is replaced by an AI-generated summary: a few paragraphs detailing how good sourdough tastes, the upsides of its prebiotic abilities, and more. To the right, there are three links to sites with information that Reid says "corroborates" what's in the summary. Google calls this the "AI snapshot." All of it is by Google's large language models, all of it sourced from the open web. Reid then mouses up to the top right of the box and clicks an icon Google's designers call "the bear claw," which looks like a hamburger menu with a vertical line to the left. The bear claw opens a new view: the AI snapshot is now split sentence by sentence, with links underneath to the sources of the information for that specific sentence. This, Reid points out again, is corroboration. And she says it's key to the way Google's AI implementation is different. "We want [the LLM], when it says something, to tell us as part of its goal: what are some sources to read more about that?" A few seconds later, Reid clicks back and starts another search. This time, she searches for the best Bluetooth speakers for the beach. Again, standard search results appear almost immediately, and again, AI results are generated a few seconds later. This time, there's a short summary at the top detailing what you should care about in such a speaker: battery life, water resistance, sound quality. Links to three buying guides sit off to the right, and below are shopping links for a half-dozen good options, each with an AI-generated summary next to it. I ask Reid to follow up with the phrase "under $100," and she does so. The snapshot regenerates with new summaries and new picks. "This is the new look of Google's search results page," concludes Pierce. "It's AI-first, it's colorful, and it's nothing like you're used to. It's powered by some of Google's most advanced LLM work to date, including a new general-purpose model called PaLM 2 and the Multitask Unified Model (MUM) that Google uses to understand multiple types of media." "In the demos I saw, it's often extremely impressive. And it changes the way you'll experience search, especially on mobile, where that AI snapshot often eats up the entire first page of your results."

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