Google rolls out AI-powered search experience in U.S.

Google has rolled out artificial intelligence (AI) powered search experience for users. The new search experience, AI Overviews, will begin rolling out to everyone in the U.S. this week with more countries coming soon.

"That means that this week, hundreds of millions of users will have access to AI Overviews, and we expect to bring them to over a billion people by the end of the year," says Liz Reid, vice-president and head of Google Search.

"Sometimes you want a quick answer, but you don’t have time to piece together all the information you need. Search will do the work for you with AI Overviews," Reid says. “People have already used AI Overviews billions of times through our experiment in Search Labs. They like that they can get both a quick overview of a topic and links to learn more. We’ve found that with AI Overviews, people use Search more, and are more satisfied with their results."

On Tuesday, Google introduced a series of updates across the Gemini family of models, including the new 1.5 Flash, its lightweight model for speed and efficiency, and Project Astra, its vision for the future of AI assistants.

This comes as Google faces its biggest challenge from rivals such as Microsoft-backed OpenAI. On May 13, OpenAI announced a new flagship generative AI model GPT-4o, claiming it a step towards "much more natural human-computer interaction". OpenAI's GPT-4o accepts as input any combination of text, audio, and image and generates any combination of text, audio, and image outputs.

One of the most exciting transformations with Gemini has been in Google Search, says Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google. “In the past year, we’ve answered billions of queries as part of our Search Generative Experience. People are using it to Search in entirely new ways, and asking new types of questions, longer and more complex queries, even searching with photos, and getting back the best the web has to offer,” says Pichai.

Google says AI Overviews will help with increasingly complex questions. “Rather than breaking your question into multiple searches, you can ask your most complex questions, with all the nuances and caveats you have in mind, all in one go,” it claims.

“With AI Overviews, people are visiting a greater diversity of websites for help with more complex questions. And we see that the links included in AI Overviews get more clicks than if the page had appeared as a traditional web listing for that query,” says Reid.