Google expands AI Overviews, launches AI Mode for search

Today Google has announced that AI Overviews are now powered by Gemini 2.0 in the US. This will help with harder questions relating to coding, advanced math, and multimodal queries. Google promises faster and higher quality responses.

It also boasts that more than a billion people are "using" AI Overviews, which is disingenuous to say the least, since this is not a service that you opt into - you just get it thrown at you whenever Google wants. So those "users" don't really have a choice. But good news - more people won't have any choice anymore, as AI Overviews are now expanding to teens and people who aren't logged into their Google accounts. So if that was your workaround to get around AI Overviews, well, it's gone. The future truly is here.

Moving on, Google seems to think there just isn't enough AI in your search pages, even with AI Overviews, so it's launching AI Mode as an experiment in search (for now). This one you can actually opt into from Search Labs.

It expands what AI Overviews can do with "more advanced reasoning, thinking and multimodal capabilities", so basically all of the most recent AI hype buzzwords are covered. This is a tab that shows in the leftmost position up top, even to the left of the "All" tab, and when you're in it you can ask for stuff and then go further with follow-up questions and "helpful web links" (for now, at least).

AI Mode uses a custom version of Gemini 2.0 and is "particularly helpful for questions that need further exploration, comparisons, and reasoning", Google says without really understanding what "reasoning" or "thinking" mean (but that's not just a Google problem of course). The selling point here is that "you can ask nuanced questions that might have previously taken multiple searches", and then you'll need to check all the answers with multiple searches if you want accuracy above all else.

This experience brings together "advanced model capabilities" with Google's "best-in-class information systems", whatever any of those words mean. You can access high-quality web content, and also tap into "fresh, real-time sources like the Knowledge Graph". There's also shopping data for billions of products because of course there is.

And here's the inevitable small print: "while we aim for AI responses in Search to present information objectively based on what’s available on the web, it’s possible that some responses may unintentionally appear to take on a persona or reflect a particular opinion". But don't worry, all of that will be addressed in the next testing phase. Also coming soon: more visual responses with images and video, richer formatting, and "new ways to get helpful web content", whatever that means.

Google will start inviting Google One AI Premium subscribers to be the first ones to try AI Mode.

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