Google is extending AI-generated summaries of search results to Ireland as part of a wider roll-out of the company’s artificial intelligence products.
The tech giant said AI overviews, a feature that creates summaries for search queries, would be rolled out to nine European countries including Ireland, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland.
The overviews are AI-generated summaries that are included on a search results page alongside the search links to point users to content around the web.
The service will be available in languages including German, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish in selected regions.
Announcing the expansion of the service, Google said the feature was a natural next step in its services, noting that people who used AI overviews used Google’s search product more, resulting in “higher quality” clicks from users who spent more time on the pages.
Google said the content would allow users to ask questions without language being a barrier, with the AI pulling different sources to provide expertise and richer content.
“What happens is basically now when they click, they know that this is going to be a relevant page. They’re really engaging with the content that’s going forward,” Google’s vice-president of search Liz Reid said.
Initially offered to US users last May, the service initially proved controversial after it provided a number of incorrect answers. These included a recipe for pizza sauce that included glue and a summary that misstated that former US president Barack Obama was Muslim.
The company has made a number of changes to cut back on the potential for offensive content or incorrect information, restricting what queries would generate the AI answers and removing user-generated content from source material for answers. – Additional reporting: Reuters
