Google Adds More Generative AI Capabilities to Search

Three months after it released a generative AI-powered Search experience in preview, Google is adding several useful new features.

“Today, we’re sharing upgrades to our generative AI-powered Search experience (SGE) to help you better learn and make sense of information on the web,” Google vice president Rany Ng writes in the announcement post, “whether it’s deepening your understanding of complicated concepts, boosting your coding skills or tracking down details within a complex topic.”

Google launched SGE in May in preview with three AI experiments: Learn more, answer a specific question, and research and compare products. Then, in early August, it added three more updates that helped users get a better understanding through images and videos, get AI-powered overviews more quickly, and learn more when something caught their interest.

Today’s SGE update provides the following new capabilities:

See definitions within AI-generated responses. When you come across a term you don’t understand in an AI-generated response, you will soon be able to hover over that term and see a pop-up preview definition. This feature will support “science, economics, history, and more” terms at first and expand over time.

Get a better understanding of coding information in AI overviews. SGE already suggests code snippets for common tasks and can help you find answers to how-to coding questions. But it now also uses color-coded syntax highlighting, making it easier to find keywords, comments, and strings, which makes it easier to understand the code itself.

Use generative AI to learn more easily as you browse the web. A new Search Labs experiment called “SGE while browsing” is now available in the Google app on Android and iPhone. It will create AI-generated lists of the key points of an article you’re reading article covers, and provide links so you can navigate to what you’re looking for directly on the page. An “Explore on page” feature will also show you the questions that the article answers and help you jump to the relevant section to learn more. This experiment is also coming to Chrome on desktop “in the days ahead,” Google says.

To use SGE, you need to opt-in at Google Search Labs using a Google personal account with Chrome for desktop or the Google app on Android or iPhone.