On Thursday, Google said it offers teens a generative AI search experience. Along with an upgrade to assist in training the AI model powering the search experience to better recognize false or offensive inquiries, the business is also adding a new feature to provide context to the material users see.
The AI-powered search experience, sometimes called SGE (Search Generative Experience), adds a conversational mode to Google Search to have a natural dialogue with Google about a subject.
Teens in the United States between the ages of 13 and 17 who have a Google Account can sign up for Search Labs this week to use the AI search experience on the Google app or Chrome desktop.
Hema Budaraju, senior director of product management at Google, stated in a blog post that “generative AI can help younger people ask questions that they couldn’t typically get answered by a search engine and pose follow-up questions to help them dig deeper.” We want to strike the correct balance when introducing this new technology to teenagers so that they can take advantage of all it offers while simultaneously prioritizing safety and addressing their developmental requirements. After consulting with researchers and specialists in teen development, we’ve incorporated extra safety measures into the experience.
According to Budaraju, Google has guardrails to stop unsuitable or hazardous information from showing up. For instance, the corporation has strengthened controls for “outputs related to illegal or age-gated substances or bullying.”
Google says that after the launch of SGE, it has discovered that the experience is more prevalent among younger users. Hence the expansion to teenagers. According to Google, people between 18 and 24 have the most excellent satisfaction ratings since they tend to ask inquiries more casually.
Google is launching a new tool to provide users with additional information about the content they see in addition to exposing the AI search experience to adolescents. The business enhances the AI search experience by including an “About this result” notification, which has long been in the default Google Search experience. According to Google, the alerts will explain how SGE produced the response so that consumers can better understand how the technology functions.
To help users learn more about the web pages supporting the data in AI-powered overviews, Google expects to shortly add “About this result” to the individual links in SGE answers.
The business claims it concentrates on delivering precise enhancements to the AI search experience. When a query contains an offensive or misleading premise, the AI-powered response may serve to validate the offensive or erroneous assertion; therefore, this is one area where it needs improvement. Even if the websites refer to trustworthy information, Google emphasizes that this can still occur.
To solve this issue, Google is releasing an update that will assist in training the AI model to more accurately identify these kinds of inflammatory or false premise searches and provide better, more accurate answers. The business is also developing methods to analyze its first draft responses to delicate questions using sophisticated language models, then rewrite them by standards for quality and safety.
With the help of new tools to deliver summaries and definitions, support for videos and images, local information, and trip suggestions, Google has spent the last several months upgrading the AI search experience. Ads that would display next to the AI-generated responses have also been tested.
