Google has announced an expansion of its AI Overviews feature, which will now be available to users worldwide, even those who are not logged in. There will also be a new search engine mode, AI Mode, which transforms the usual search into an interactive dialogue with artificial intelligence.
Image source: Google
Google continues to expand its use of AI Overviews in its search engine, showing AI-generated summaries for more and more queries and making them available to all users. But the other new feature that’s far more interesting is a dedicated AI search mode called AI Mode.
AI Mode is a search chatbot integrated directly into the main search engine. The tool resembles Perplexity or ChatGPT Search, but is adapted for Google. As TheVerge writes, AI Mode is currently only available to Google One AI Premium subscribers, but even they must manually enable it in the Labs section.
The main idea behind AI Mode is that many users like to get a generated answer immediately, rather than browsing through links. In this mode, the query is processed by an AI search model that uses data from the Google index and also adds links to sources. Visually, AI Mode resembles the Gemini chatbot, but unlike it, it can analyze information in real time and interact with web pages.
Some experts note that Google is increasingly moving away from the traditional search model, in which users click on sites from a list of links. However, vice president of search products Robby Stein disagrees. “AI Overviews give users the context they need, which in turn makes them more likely to click on links and spend more time on sites,” he explained. According to the company, new technologies do not replace old search mechanisms, but rather improve them.
Google says AI Mode isn’t an attempt to completely replace traditional search. However, it’s clear that AI technology is already making a significant difference to the search engine, which is increasingly tied to artificial intelligence in its future. As for the AI Overviews feature, it will use an updated Gemini 2.0 model, which Stein says will improve responses to queries involving math, programming, and logical analysis.