(NewsNation) — A few months after launching its “Search Generative Experience,” powered by artificial intelligence, Google is announcing it’s experimenting with a new feature.
Now, along with new search capabilities, users will be able to get articles summarized for them.
This new summarization tool will be rolled out starting Tuesday and made available first on Android and iOS, with the company aiming to bring it to the Chrome desktop browser in the future.
Those who have already opted into the Search Generative Experience will get automatic access to the new experiment. “SGE while browsing,” as it’s called, is also available as a standalone experiment in Search Labs, Rany Ng, Google’s vice president of product management and search, said in a blog post.
Early feedback for the Search Generative Experience has been positive, Ng said.
“Since the initial rollout, we’ve continuously made improvements to make the experience even more helpful,” he wrote.
One of these improvements, Ng said, is having SGE create an AI-generated list of the “key points” an article covers on certain web pages users visit. This list will include links that take people to what they’re looking for on the page, Ng said. With a feature called “Explore on page,” users can see questions the article answers and go to the “relevant section” to learn more.
“We think these capabilities can be particularly helpful when you’re learning something new or complex, but they can also come in handy for other tasks like finding a new recipe or researching a big purchase,” Ng said.
Ng stressed that “SGE while browsing” will show these key points on articles that are not paywalled. Publishers are in control, he added, and can learn how to designate their content as free or paywalled in Google’s Help Center.
In addition to the article summarization, Google is also testing a feature that will let users hover over certain words to preview definitions and even see related diagrams or images on the topic.