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Google has extended the pilot for its upcoming AI-generated search results, dubbed Search Generative Experience (SGE), past the original end date of December 2023.
SGE is currently available for the public to try in Google Search Labs. Since it debuted in May 2023, a small label on the site has read, "Ends Dec 2023." But this week, Google removed the label and confirmed to PCMag via email that the company plans to continue testing and exploring the applications for AI in search.
Perhaps the label was a holdover from earlier this year when Google repeatedly referred to its AI products as "experimental," suggesting it had some doubts about the technology. Now it looks like the company is ready to go all in.
SGE offers a ChatGPT-style summary to "let AI do the heavy lifting for you," per the description in Search Labs. Those who have toggled on SGE will see an AI-generated summary at the top for most searches, though not all. They can scroll past it to see the traditional results, or expand it to read more. The latter often takes up the entire screen, as shown on the right in the image below on desktop.
Responses to SGE have been mixed. In September, Google said younger users (ages 18-24) are finding it "especially useful," so it expanded access to teens (13-17). Others have not found it compelling. "It's just an awful user experience that goes completely against Google's stated premise of elevating expertise, authority, and trust," according to one Reddit user.
Google shows no signs of slowing down its experiments. It continues to add new capabilities to SGE, such as an image generator. Another function is the AI-powered browsing assistant, which goes beyond search to help "you understand the key points and get straight to what you're looking for on the page."
Google's Bard AI chatbot also got an upgrade this week with a new Gemini model, which it claims can outperform the free version of ChatGPT. Bard and SGE remain separate experiences as of this writing, and Google has not yet said if and how they may be merged in the future.
Reinventing the search results page may have tangible effects on the way the world consumes information, as Google fields 85% of global search queries. Digital publications have also raised the alarm about the technology's potential to cut into their traffic since it summarizes content rather than sends users to the source. For example, The Atlantic's internal testing found that 75% of the time, SGE generated a summary for a search inquiry that gave people all the information they needed, The Wall Street Journal reports.