Portland, OR, USA - Feb 8, 2024: Homepage of Google.com, showing a webpage link beneath the search box promoting its Gemini AI models, is seen on a laptop computer.
Searching the internet is changing forever with Google officially commencing the roll-out of their AI overviews in Google Search for Australians.
An AI Overview is Google’s Artificial Intelligence answer to your question or search.
It’s clearly marked with a blue bar titled “AI Overview” with a very clear natural language answer to the search query.
The AI Overviews will come into their own for “how to” or pure question searches. If you ask for the best way to do something, you’ll likely get a direct answer to that question.
This happens in some way now with what Google calls “Snippets” – attempts at answers and drop down results. AI Overviews take it a step further with a clear and concise answer.
The answers still include links to the sources of the information, but it will dramatically restrict the flow of traffic from Google to websites all around the world.
It’s a generational change. Google admits that in their testing they see far stronger engagement with AI Overviews among younger users aged 18-24. This goes to the way that generation is spending their time online.
Over their testing globally and in Australia, Google has found users more satisfied with the results using AI Overviews..
Google believes their data shows an increase to traffic to the websites linked within the AI Overviews, compared to previous designs, however it’s yet to be seen how that effects results further down the results page.
Trev is a Technology Commentator, Dad, Speaker and Rev Head.
He produces and hosts several popular podcasts, EFTM, Two Blokes Talking Tech, Two Blokes Talking Electric Cars, The Best Movies You’ve Never Seen, and the Private Feed. He is the resident tech expert for Triple M on radio across Australia, and is the resident Tech Expert on Channel 9’s Today Show and appears regularly on 9 News, A Current Affair and Sky News Early Edition.
Father of three, he is often found in his Man Cave.
Amazon has revealed the most asked questions of Alexa this year in Australia, with Taylor…
Motorola and Swarovski have announced a new collaboration today, launching crystal accented editions of the…
Spotify Wrapped, Google Trends now Vodafone Unwrapped - the Telco is digging into their data…
Edifier are launching its best-selling bookshelf speakers, the R1280DB Bluetooth Bookshelf Speakers, in Australia and…
We review a lot of laptops here at EFTM and many of them are business-oriented…
It's that time of year folks, stand by for summaries of the year from every…