Highlights:

  • SGE is a variant of the company’s search engine introduced this month at Google I/O which includes a new panel to the query results pages.
  • Search Labs offers SGE software testing. Users may join by clicking the Labs symbol in Google’s mobile app and Chrome Beta, which provides access to upcoming features.

Google Inc. began providing access to SGE, Search Generative Experience, a pilot version of its search engine having generative AI capabilities.

Search Labs is a software testing initiative that provides access to SGE. By clicking on the Labs icon in Google’s mobile app and Chrome Beta, a Chrome version that allows access to forthcoming features, users can sign up to participate. The Alphabet Inc. division will notify consumers via email when program access is granted.

SGE is a variant of the company’s search engine introduced this month at Google I/O which adds a new panel to query results pages. The panel is displayed above search results and contains text generated by artificial intelligence. It also includes additional components, such as an instrument for asking follow-up inquiries.

If a customer tries searching for information about a travel destination, the SGE panel will give a brief, natural language summary of the location. In addition, it provides an inventory of the websites from which the information was obtained. A shortcut below the text allows users to ask AI-generated follow-up inquiries or compose themselves.

Google claims that SGE can answer extremely specific queries. A user could, for instance, request that the AI compare the features of two similar products from the same company and recommend alternatives. When processing product searches, SGE surfaces merchandise that matches the user’s description and highlights purchase-related considerations.

Soufi Esmaeilzadeh and Srinivasan Venkatachary, Google executives, said, “The new generative AI-powered Search experience will help you take some of the work out of searching. So instead of asking a series of questions and piecing together that information yourself, Search now can do some of that heavy lifting for you.”

SGE is just one of the experimental features that users can test via Google’s Search Labs program. Code Tips is a generative AI utility designed to answer programming-related queries. The ‘Add to Sheets’ feature enables users to synchronize a search result with a spreadsheet rapidly.

Google is experimenting with a chatbot service named Bard that competes with OpenAI LP’s ChatGPT. With the announcement of SGE at Google I/O earlier this month, the search engine behemoth made Bard available in 180 additional countries. Additionally, the company disclosed new information about the technology underlying its generative AI features.

Bard is propelled by PaLM 2, a large language model that is reportedly more capable than Google’s previous neural networks. It provides more precise responses to queries requiring reasoning. Moreover, Google says PaLM 2 is more hardware-efficient than its predecessors.