It’s been six months since Google started adding AI-generated text to the top of many Google Search queries by default, and this experiment — that’s what a disclaimer at the bottom of each AI Overview says it is — hasn’t entirely been a rip-roaring success, Google acknowledged to Mashable.
While “AI overviews on balance and at large are very compelling sets of things that are helpful to the users,” said Hema Budaraju, Google’s senior director of product management for Search, “we have work to do on the quality side of things, which is an ever growing need.”
AI Overviews launched with a slogan of sorts: “Let Google do the searching for you,” but after some controversy at the start — notably that couple of weeks where stories kept coming out about Google Search telling people to eat rocks and put glue on pizza — the company appears to have pulled back a bit. At launch, AI Overviews showed up in about 15 percent of Google Search results pages, but that number was reduced to about 7 percent by the end of June, according to Search Engine Land.
So has quality improved over the past six months?
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