Explaining What Exactly is Google Search Generative Experience

It has been a crucial week for the search business, with Google revealing fascinating plans for expanding its search strategy, notably enhancing how users search for and view results. The updates were unveiled alongside other technological advancements at the annual developer conference, Google I/O on May 10, 2023.

Google stated that it is making Search “visual, snackable, personal, and human” and has provided us with a first look at the new Search Generative Experience (SGE). But before we go any further, let us first know what Google Search Generative Experience actually is.

What is Google Search Generative Experience?

The Google Search Generative Experience (SGE) is a game-changing improvement to what we previously knew as “Google Search.” According to Google, it will be driven by generative AI and will be integrated directly into Google Search.

When using SGE, people will notice that their search results page contains recognizable online results that have been organized in a new way to enable them to receive more from a single search. Furthermore, the new Search experience will help people rapidly locate and make sense of content by providing AI-powered overviews, suggestions to explore more, and methods to organically follow up while searching.

SGE will enable individuals to:

• Ask questions that you never believed Search would be able to answer.

• Get a quick overview of a topic, with links to related results to delve further.

• Ask natural follow-up questions in a new conversational manner.

• And do more tasks quickly, such as coming up with original ideas and draughts directly in Search.

How Does SGE Looks and Feels

Here is a screenshot from Google that has been used to demonstrate Google’s all-new search experience.

Google will generate a response for certain queries, but not all, and display this animation of Google generating an answer. Google will display some of the most reliable and high-quality websites as clickable links with an image, title, and URL directly in the response box. These websites, which make up a portion of the response, have a high level of trust from Google, which is why they are displayed in this answer box.

You may use the toggle expander button to delve further into the answers and/or ask follow-up questions below. Alternatively, you may scroll past it to get the more standard search result listings.

How Does SGE Work

To work, Google Search Generative Experience employs a slew of AI, LLMs, and machine learning techniques, as well as a plethora of fascinating search algorithms. A range of big language models, including an upgraded version of MUM and PaLM2, enable this new experience. This model is distinct from the one Bard utilizes because, according to Google, it was purposefully trained to carry out tasks related to search, such as ways to discover high-quality sites that verify the data in the result.

However, Google won’t always respond to your questions since it is attempting to be cautious with this updated Google Search, which will only provide responses to safer searches.

For example, Google will not offer an answer to an inquiry about providing Tylenol to a child since it is in the medical sector. Google may potentially refuse to display responses to financial queries as well.

This is because Google is being cautious in the YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) categories and is trying to expand YMYL to incorporate civic information. According to Google, SGE is not intended to display potentially hazardous, hateful, or explicit content in its replies, just as its ranking techniques are not intended to surprisingly shock or offend individuals with such content.

Google also added that when it comes to generating responses about certain queries where information quality is critically important, they hold this new search experience to an even higher standard. This new search experience emphasizes on producing informative responses that are corroborated by reliable sources.

Furthermore, Google aims to not generate an AI-powered snapshot in situations when there are “information gaps” or “data voids” and its algorithms are less confident in their responses. And as for explicit or harmful topics, Google will refrain from giving a search result.