Get hands-on early with the Gemini 'Ask This Page' tool

At I/O 2024, Google announced a whole series generative AI-powered features for all its major products. The company even made a joke at the end of the keynote by counting how many times someone on stage said the term “AI” (it was more than 120 times). But as Google is wont to do, not many of the features the company launched that day are actually available to the public yet. Today however, Android Authority I looked early at a Twin feature launched at I/O called “Ask This Page.”

As the name suggests, Ask This Page allows you to collect specific information from a web page by having Gemini 'read' it first. Think of it as an interactive personal assistant. It does the hard work for you by reading the entire web page, and then you can simply ask for the specific information you are looking for, saving you a ton of time.

This is very similar to two other 'Ask This…' features that Google launched at I/O: 'Ask This PDF' and 'Ask This Video'. We already had the opportunity to test out Ask This PDF at I/O on a loan pixel, and it worked very well (watch the video embedded above for that experience). However, that test took place in a highly controlled environment on a device that wasn't ours, and there was only one test PDF. However, with our early access to Ask This Page, we had a lot more time to push the system to see if there were any cracks in it – and sure enough, there are.

Before we dive in, I want to be honest and say that this is all based on an early look at this feature. It's possible that Google will make significant changes before rolling it out to the general public. In other words, take everything here with a grain of salt.

To activate Ask This Page, simply pull up the Gemini overlay while looking at a web page on your computer Android phone by pressing and holding the power button. Because Gemini is now context-aware – a topic Google spent a lot of time on at I/O 2024 – it knows you've placed it on a web page. This will activate the Ask This Page icon you see in the image above.

Tapping this will prompt Gemini to scan the page. This may take some time, the amount depending on how long/complex the page is. Once it's done, a text box will appear that says, “Get help with what's on this page.”

Once you see that prompt, you can ask questions about the page in natural language. Check out some screenshots below to see how this worked on one Android Authority article about a new Microsoft OneNote feature leak.

In this example, we placed the Gemini overlay over the article, scanned the page, and then asked if the feature described in the article was actually released. You can see Gemini's response in the third screenshot: “According to the article, the reminder feature is currently in development and not yet released.” This is true, so we have a great test run for Ask This Page!

However, this was a very simple test. Let's see what happens when we push the boundaries.

My first instinctive reaction when testing Ask This Page was to feed it false information and see if it could use its broader understanding of the web to provide proper context to the questions I ask. In other words, if I read a website that contains false information and ask Gemini about that article, will Gemini simply feed me back the false information?

In this test, that's exactly what it does. We took out a stupid satirical (read: completely made up) article The onion and asked Gemini questions about it. In the article, a mother named Dina Marchesi (who does not exist) refuses to believe that she repeatedly makes hateful comments to her daughter and others. For this article, we asked Gemini, “Did she tell her daughter about her dress?” Gemini confirms that Dina Marchesi commented on her daughter's dress. Check out the screenshot below for the full answer:

Let's break this response down a bit. First, Gemini dutifully answers the question without providing any context to the fact that this web page is The onion – perhaps the most famous satirical news site ever. There's a disclaimer at the bottom about how Gemini “may display incorrect information, including about people,” which seems like a catch-all way to account for situations like this. Yet this is true The onion, and you'd think Gemini would point that out. What if this was a site with false information that isn't so open about it? The onion is?

The answer also clearly states the source of the information Gemini provides, which in this case is this lone article. This means we don't get a broader context from the internet, at least not for this question.

Essentially, this example makes it seem like Ask This Page is a more complex version of an AI summary. Instead of summarizing an article into a few key points, the user can activate summaries on specific information contained therein.

At this point we thought this was the limit of Ask This Page. But then we tried a few more experiments and discovered that it's more open-ended than it seems.

Questions about this page? More like 'Request share this page'

A web page contains much more than just text. For this next set of tests, we wanted to see if Gemini could extract information from the entire page, including images, tables, comments, etc. To do this, we set Gemini to our recent hands-on article with the new Chipolo trackers.

Let's start with images. We asked Gemini if ​​there is an acceptable use policy for the new Chipolo trackers. The answer is “yes,” which is what a human reading the article would see by looking at one of the screenshots on the page. Unfortunately, Gemini did not find this information in that image. However, it did find the information on the Internet:

This is a very confusing outcome. The first sentence of Gemini's response reads: “The linked document does not explicitly state an acceptable use policy,” except that it largely does, just in an image rather than in the text. For whatever reason, Gemini couldn't find that information, so he hunted elsewhere. This proves two things: Gemini can confidently tell you that what you're looking for isn't on a page even though it says so, and that Ask this page can for certain questions, search for a broader context on the internet. In other words, the previous issue where Gemini didn't acknowledge that The onion article is satire is not due to the inability to access information outside of the specific web page you added to it. Google simply doesn't have any protections for such situations.

We then asked Gemini whether the new Chipolo tracker is water resistant. This information is not mentioned in the written text of the article, but it is shown to have an IPX5 rating in an attached specification table. This time Gemini had no problem finding that information:

Okay, so pictures don't work, but spec tables do. What about comments? The article itself does not mention that the tracker supports a left notification. However, this information is discussed by the author of the article in the comments. Let's see what happens when we ask Gemini for this information:

Once again we have a situation where the information is on the web page, but Gemini doesn't find it and then confidently tells us it's not there before searching the internet.

Finally, can Gemini tell us more about who actually created a web page (or, in this example, who wrote the article)? The author of this article, Rita El Khoury, is a staple of the world of tech journalism, with literally thousands of articles written over a career that has spanned nearly two decades. Here's what Gemini had to say when we asked for more information about the author of the article:

In this case, Gemini simply did not answer the question. There was a lot of information about Rita on the page itself (if you tap Rita's photo in the byline you will find a lot of information about her), and no searching of the internet for further details, there are plenty of them.

Gemini Ask this page hands-on: can you trust it?

All in all, this feature isn't terrible. It certainly doesn't tell us to put glue on pizza, drink urine, or eat rocks, like Google's AI overview results have been done recently. That's a low bar, but Ask This Page goes above and beyond.

Yet there is so much missing here. There is no warning that the page you are reading is blatant satire. It seems to pick and choose when it wants to search the web for more information/context or just stay on the one page you fed it. It can't 'read' an entire web page, with things like images and comments hiding valuable details you'll probably want to know more about. And sometimes it just doesn't answer the question, even though it has the ability to do so.

As I mentioned at the top of this article, this feature hasn't been officially rolled out yet, so there's still time for Google to make some adjustments. Based on Google's push to get AI features live regardless of whether they're ready or not, I wouldn't be surprised if Ask This Page launches as is with few changes.

What do you think? Based on our experiences here, will you be using Ask This Page when it goes live? Let us know in the survey above and don't forget to click in the comments to explain your answer.