Google Launches AI Overviews in Search in the US in May , and the results weren’t great — the feature notoriously recommended eating rocks and putting glue on pizza. Google still hasn’t explained why it thought it was a good idea to replace the old, non-AI-branded search query summaries with this new, AI-branded but inferior feature, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure it out: everything has to be AI these days, regardless of its actual usefulness.
With that in mind, Google today announced the triumphant expansion of AI Overviews to six more countries, following the rather disastrous experiment in the US. The new places getting AI Overviews to replace the old AI-free (but far more accurate and reliable) overviews are the UK, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil. The expansion comes with local language support in each of these countries.
While AI Overviews may be a lot of hallucinations (and taking satire for reality), Google is happy to let us know that it has “seen more engagement from younger users, ages 18-24, when they use Search with AI Overviews.” To that, we can only say that AI Overviews are probably better than TikTok. Google also says that “people prefer Search with AI Overviews and find their search results more useful.” Whether they are more accurate doesn’t seem to be an issue at all.
Either way, there's now a right-link view for AI Overviews on desktop (which can also be accessed on mobile by tapping the site icons in the upper right). Google is also testing adding links to relevant web pages directly within the text of AI Overviews, to make it easier to jump in and see what you're interested in.
A new experiment in Search Labs lets you save a specific AI overview for future use. All you need to do is tap the new Save button that appears below your AI overview. You can then view your saved overviews by tapping your profile icon and navigating to your Interests page. This is only available for US English and you will first need to enroll in the “AI Overviews and more” experiment in Search Labs.
Finally, some AI Overviews will have an option to simplify the language with a single tap, which can be useful if you're new to a topic and want an easier way to digest information. There's a huge missed opportunity here for Google to name this button “Dumb it down, please.”