Google's "AI Overviews" from now on in six new countries

Google's parent company, Alphabet, announced Thursday, August 15, that it is bringing its long-awaited search summary UI to an additional six countries around the world. Only two months after the release of the new web functionality and the initial problems, now Google has decided to expand the functionality faster.

The web giant rolled out "AI Overviews" -- which appear right at the top of searches before traditional web page links -- to US users in May, after taking about a year to test on a limited number of users.

The new feature was met with a wave of criticism when it was released, after users shared unfortunate results when searching for a pizza recipe, or when former US President Barack Obama was labeled a Muslim.

Google reacted fairly quickly and immediately announced the update in May. With this came a clearer restriction on which queries would include UI-generated responses, and Google also removed sites like Reddit from the list of information sources.

In an interview with Reuters, he Hema Budaraja, senior product director at Google said: “I have enough evidence to say that the quality is only improving". In doing so, she pointed to data that Google collects internally, which shows that users with access to the new feature reported a higher level of satisfaction and also spent more time searching with more specific searches compared to users who did not have access.

"AI Overviews" are coming to Brazil, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico and Great Britain. Also new are two local languages, namely Portuguese and Hindi. Google has also changed the display of web pages, which will now be placed on the right side as part of the UI of the generated results, and more links will be available.

Google also wrote in the blog that they are internally checking the possibility of further updates that would bring the links directly into the text of the UI summary. This is definitely in line with what Google promised some time ago, that it will try to have "AI Overviews" direct web traffic to relevant web pages.

The updates come amid concerns the media industry has voiced for more than a year about the potential for AI-powered search to steal traffic from media companies. Budaraju said the new update will have a "three-way benefit" for Google, consumers and publishers.