Google is expanding AI Overviews, the feature that summarizes answers to complex questions from the web and presents them at the top of traditional search results, to six more countries -- India, Japan, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil and the United Kingdom -- from Thursday with support for local languages as well as English. That's less than three months after AI Overviews launched in the United States and promptly told people to eat rocks and put glue on their pizzas. Bringing them to millions more people begs the question: How do you prevent another glue pizza fiasco in a foreign country? "It's a challenging space," Hema Budaraju, senior director of product management for Search at Google, told Engadget in an interview. "Understanding quality at the scale of the web across all these languages is a hard problem, and integrating LLMs (large language models) is not easy to do. Using AI to better understand languages is pretty critical."

Google has been working to marry its new-found focus on generative AI with its existing expertise in search since mid-May, as part of Search Lab's Google Search Generative Experience (SGE) project. On Wednesday, the company announced that the SGE program is expanding beyond America's digital borders and into both the Japanese and Indian marketplaces. SGE is Google's answer to Microsoft's Bing AI and is designed to provide summarized and curated answers to input prompts rather than a list of webpages. Google's system differs from Microsoft's in that it incorporates its AI directly into the existing search bar rather than run it as a separate chatbot assistant. The company began expanding access to the SGE program in late May for US users and, this week, rolled out Search Labs to users in India and Japan.

Google's take on AI-powered search begins rolling out today. The company announced this morning that it's opening access to Google Search Generative Experience (SGE) and other Search Labs in the US. If you haven't already, you'll need to sign up for the waitlist and sit tight until you get an email announcing it's your turn. Revealed at Google I/O 2023 earlier this month, Google SGE is the company's infusion of conversational AI into the classic search experience. If you've played with Bing AI, expect a familiar -- yet different -- product. Cherlynn Low noted in Engadget's SGE preview that Google's AI-powered search uses the same input bar you're used to rather than a separate chatbot field like in Bing.

It's fair to say that Google was caught flat-footed by Microsoft's launch of Bing search powered by ChatGPT, as it didn't have anything similar when it unveiled its own conversational AI, Bard. Now, Google has announced Search Labs, a new way for consumers to test "bold new ideas and ideas we're exploring" in search, the company said at its I/O 2023 keynote. There are three key features available for a limited time. The first is called Search Generative Experience (SGE), bringing generative AI directly into Google Search. "The new Search experience helps you quickly find and make sense of information," Google's Direct of Search wrote.