Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE) is getting a big new feature: images and video. This is a significant upgrade that will make SGE even more informative and engaging. SGE is still in the experimental phase, but it has the potential to revolutionize the way we search for information online. By adding images and video to search results, SGE can provide a more immersive and informative experience for users.
For example, if you search for “how to make a cake,” SGE might show you a photo of a cake, a video of someone making a cake, and a link to a recipe for a cake. This would give you a much better understanding of how to make a cake than if you were just given a list of text links. In a blog post, Google explains support for images and video in Search Labs and Search Generative Experience:
“Sometimes, it’s more powerful to understand something by seeing it — so we recently brought images to even more AI-powered overviews. For example, when you search for something like “tiniest birds of prey,” you’ll quickly be able to reference what the bird looks like and get relevant information from the web. And over the next week, you’ll begin to see videos within some overviews where it’s helpful to see something in motion, such as a demonstration of a yoga pose, or how to get stains out of marble.”
Of course, there are still some challenges that Google needs to overcome before SGE can be widely adopted. One challenge is that SGE can be slow to load. Another challenge is that SGE needs to be able to accurately understand user queries. In addition to the inclusion of images and video, Google is also working on making SGE faster and more contextual. This means that SGE will be able to provide more relevant results, and it will be able to do so more quickly.
Search Generative Experience: A New Future for Search
Google announced SGE at its annual I/O conference in May. The Search Generative Experience (SGE) feature is currently available in preview mode for users who sign up for the Search Labs program. SGE is a new feature for Google’s search engine that uses large language models (LLMs) such as Pathways Language Model 2 (PaLM2) and Multitask Unified Model (MUM), which can produce natural language text from different sources of information.
SGE can deal with complex and multi-step questions by creating a “snapshot” of relevant information from different webpages and displaying it at the top of the search results. Users can also ask additional questions to get more specific or detailed information.
For example, if you are looking for a laptop, you can ask SGE what are the basic features to consider, and get a summary of different articles that include the query. You can then ask for laptop options under a certain budget, and get a list of choices from Google’s Shopping Graph, which includes sponsored products. SGE can also assist you with coding questions by using Code Tips, which can offer you code snippets and insights for various programming languages.
Search Labs is a program launched at I/O 2023 that allows users to test experiments that use artificial intelligence to improve Google Search. Some of the experiments are SGE, which provides AI summaries of topics, Code Tips, which offers tips for coding, and Add to Sheets, which enables users to insert search results into spreadsheets. Users can sign up by tapping the Labs icon in their Google App or Chrome browser.
Last Updated on November 8, 2024 12:11 pm CET
