Google's Generative AI Search Overview Is Adding Videos To Image And Text Results

Google is improving its generative AI-powered Search experience (SGE) by adding videos to image and text results. The company says it wants to help users make better sense of a sea of content by providing faster and easier ways to find what they are looking for.

Internet users have long used browser search engines to help them answer a plethora of questions. SGE allows users to quickly get up to speed on a searched topic by providing things like tips for specific questions or by discovering new products and items to consider. Now, Google is adding new features that it says will improve the search experience in "ways big and small."

For many, being able to visually see something is essential in learning. For that reason, Google recently added images to more AI-powered overviews. This allows someone who is searching for something like "largest land mammals" to see images of various mammals, along with the ability to quickly view more information on each one. Over the next week or so, users will begin to see videos within some of these overviews as well. For example, if someone wanted to know how a bird of prey captures its victims, being able to see an actual video of a bird doing so would be extremely helpful.

Google says that SGE is meant to be a jumping-off point for finding out more about a specific topic, as it provides links to other search results that might provide even more pertinent information. Accordingly, the company also added published dates to links to help people researching on the web find the most recent information in AI overviews.

Some may still remember the agony of waiting for a webpage to download via a dial-up connection years ago. Nowadays, however, people are used to pages loading almost instantaneously, with search pages loading slightly slower at times as the search engine scours the world wide web for the best information to provide. Google knows that people want their information as quickly as possible, so it recently made what it calls a major improvement that will reduce the time it takes to generate AI overviews by half.

While all of these improvements are great for anyone wanting more information in a shorter time period, the tech company is not improving the speed by removing ads. It says that ads will still appear in dedicated slots throughout the page.

Anyone interested in trying out the new Search experience can do so by downloading the Search Labs app on both Android and iOS, as well as on Chrome desktop.