Google already knows how to make AI in Search helpful, but it’s not with AI Overviews

Ben Schoon | May 26 2024 - 9:00 am PT

AI Overviews have barely been out for a week and things are already going off the rails. And, the painful part of it all is that Google has already shown that it knows how to make AI in Search truly helpful, it’s just not doing that with AI Overviews.

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The idea of AI in search has always been a truly bizarre one to me personally. Generative AI has a lot of helpful applications, but search? Search is a tool for research. You’re trying to find answers, truth, through the internet. But generative AI is constantly prone to hallucination or just being flat out wrong where it will confidently spit out blatantly false information as a firm fact.

And that’s happened immediately in AI Overviews.

Just over the past week, there have been wild and glaring examples of AI Overviews spitting out misinformation. As we said on Friday:

Running through social media online, it’s very easy to find examples of Google Search AI Overviews confidently spitting out provably incorrect information. This includes telling users to put glue on their pizza, that chicken only needs to be cooked to 102-degrees F, saying blinker fluid is a real thing, telling people they can put out an oil fire by adding more oil, and saying that there’s not a country in Africa that starts with the letter “K.”

The idea of getting a quick summary or answer with the help of AI in Search makes sense. It has become increasingly difficult to get a quick answer from Google Search as SEO spam continues to run wild, only fueled by the increased power of AI for quickly getting content out the door. But using AI to fix that problem just seems counterintuitive. AI can parse through information, yes, but it’s not very good at knowing what’s true and what’s not. It’s also apparently pretty prone to taking Reddit sarcasm as 100% fact.

AI just doesn’t belong in search results. That’s how I feel about it. If it’s there, it should at least not be at the top of the page and turned on by default. These quick answers should be a separate product – I don’t know, maybe a chatbot? If only Google had one of those too.

But, all the while, Google has also already shown that it has some excellent ideas of how AI should be used in Search, and frankly, they seem way more helpful than AI Overviews could ever be.

At Google I/O 2024, the company showed off a few more AI features coming to Search which includes multi-step reasoning. Google Search queries as they exist today are generally simple, but Google has shown that AI can help them deliver answers to way more complicated questions. One prompt used in the example below was, “Find the best yoga or pilates studios in Boston and show details on their intro offers and walking time from Beacon Hill,” to which an AI Overview was able to deliver genuinely helpful results.

There’s also planning. Using “traditional” Google Search for planning was a labor-intensive task requiring the user to dig through multiple webpages, perform multiple searches, and gather their findings manually outside of Search. But, with AI, Google seems like it will be pretty good at giving users a base itinerary for a trip or a foundation to build on for meals for the week or offering some quick and easy recommendations for restaurants.

And that’s because the AI is just delivering a more complex and capable version of things Google was already doing. That’s compelling, useful, and probably a lot less prone to the mistakes we’ve been seeing in AI Overviews thus far. I’m sure there will be mistakes in these other functions – inevitably meal planning will recommend meat in a vegan dish, for example – but the stakes are so much lower for things like these.

I still firmly believe that AI doesn’t belong in Search. The rollout of AI Overviews, if anything, just proves my point. They’re not helpful. They’re just mistake- and misinformation-prone versions of the Featured Snippets and Knowledge Panels that Google has been using for years to do the same thing AI is now tasked with. But, because AI is moving so quickly, there’s little to no chance we’re going to move backward on this.

AI is here to stay, whether we like it or not.

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