Three months ago, Google began testing its AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE), which uses generative AI to summarize search queries for users. The tool has been met with a largely positive reception, and Google is continuing to add features to the experience. New upgrades announced today will cover multiple areas, such as integrating interactive definitions into AI-generated responses, helping with understanding coding information, and improving learning while browsing web content.
Google announced multiple additions to SGE today, one of them being interactive definitions incorporated into AI-generated responses. This feature is designed to help users understand unfamiliar terms or concepts by allowing them to tap or hover over words and preview definitions. Users can also preview relevant diagrams or images, making things easier to understand.
Programmers will be happy to learn that SGE will now help you understand the code it generates by adding syntax highlighting. This means important parts of the code, like keywords, comments, and strings, will be highlighted in different colors, so you can see them easily. This should help users analyze and fix code when working through bugs.
The biggest update, however, is a new feature called Search Generative Experience While Browsing that you can use in the Google app on Android and iOS, and soon on Chrome desktop. When you open certain articles with these apps, you can tap to view a list of important points generated by SGE, making long-form articles easier to read. The points are accompanied by source links that take you to the relevant sections in the article. Additionally, there is an “Explore on page” option that shows you questions that the article answers, which you can select to jump to the relevant section in the article.
These new While Browsing features only work on articles that everyone can read for free, not those with paywalls. Google has clarified that publishers will retain the ability to determine the accessibility status of their content, allowing them to control how their content is distributed. The coding feature and SGE While Browsing are out today and must be enabled on your account before you can use them. However, the definitions within AI-generated responses will be “coming to Chrome on desktop in the days ahead.”
