Google has launched a new experimental search mode that replaces traditional links with AI-generated summaries to provide answers more quickly. This move comes as Google works to integrate AI into its search engine amid increasing competition.
Right now, Google Search already uses AI Overviews, which show brief summaries above regular search results.
The new AI Mode improves on this by offering better reasoning skills and the ability to understand different types of information, making it more useful for answering complex questions, Google explained in a blog post.
“Today, we’re sharing that we’ve launched Gemini 2.0 for AI Overviews in the U.S. to help with harder questions, starting with coding, advanced math and multimodal queries, with more on the way.”
The company added that the Gemini 2.0’s advanced capabilities will provide faster and higher quality responses and show AI Overviews more often for regular types of queries.
However, users have raised strong concerns over past AI missteps, including accuracy issues and misinformation. The company says
“Helping people discover content from the web remains central to our approach, and with AI Mode we’re making it easy for people to explore and take action. With the model’s deep information retrieval, people can better express what they’re looking for — with all their nuances and constraints — and get to the right web content in a range of formats.”
Google also says they hope to do more with the feedback and responses they’ve been “getting internally and from trusted testers, and they’ve found AI Mode incredibly helpful– they particularly appreciate the speed, quality and freshness of responses.”
The company added that, “AI Mode is rooted in our core quality and ranking systems, and we’re also using novel approaches with the model’s reasoning capabilities to improve factuality. We aim to show an AI-powered response as much as possible, but in cases where we don’t have high confidence in helpfulness and quality, the response will be a set of web search results.”
