Google I/O happened last night and as expected, the topic of AI swept the entire developer conference. One of the biggest announcements involves a radical change to its search engine with the introduction of AI Overview, which might change how most people use the internet.
AI Overview will give you an overview of whatever topic you’re searching for, with the AI-generated results pushing down links to actual websites. The overview will, of course, be derived from sites that actually have what you’re searching for, but it’s able to compile the answers to complex question in one go such as “find the best yoga or pilates studios in Boston and show me details on their intro offers, and walking time from Beacon Hill”.
Google says that the results will include links to learn more and that the links got more clicks through AI Overview than through a traditional web listing. Nevertheless, if you wish to get regular text-based results, Google is also adding a “Web” filter in the search engine hidden in the “More” tab.
According to the company, AI Overview is rolling out in the US this week and will be available globally soon, with the feature being targeted to reach over a billion people by the end of the year. It’s also adding the ability for its search engine to plan out meals and trips by having you just type out what kind of plan you want, but this seems to be limited only to the US for now.
In related news, Google is officially integrating Gemini Nano into the Chrome desktop browser, which is expected to be released on 5 June. This is the lightweight variant of its AI model that can run natively on smartphones, but the Chrome version has been tweaked to load more quickly. The feature offers on-device text generation to write reviews, social media posts, and more.
(Source: Google)
