Google brings AI answers in Search to India, other countries

Google parent Alphabet said on Thursday it was expanding its AI-generated summaries for search queries.

Google parent Alphabet said on Thursday it was expanding its AI-generated summaries for search queries to six new countries, just two months after it rolled back some capabilities following a problem-riddled launch.

The search giant made AI Overviews - which are displayed atop a search results page before traditional links to the Web - available to all U.S. users in May after spending one year trialling a limited earlier version.

The feature was widely panned after screenshots of factually inaccurate answers circulated across the internet, such as a pizza recipe that listed glue as an ingredient and an answer wrongly stating that former U.S. President Barack Obama is Muslim.

Google acknowledged the "odd and erroneous overviews" and announced updates to the product in a blog post in late May. These updates added restrictions to which queries would display AI answers and curbed user-generated content from websites like Reddit from serving as source material for answers.

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"I have enough evidence to say that quality is only improving," Hema Budaraju, a senior director of product at Google, told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday.

She pointed to data Google collects internally, which showed that users with access to the feature reported higher levels of satisfaction and searched for longer, more specific queries than users who did not.