Alphabet Inc.’s GOOG GOOGL Google has come forward to defend its AI search results, which have been under scrutiny for delivering bizarre and inaccurate information.
What Happened: Earlier this month, Google launched “AI Overviews,” formerly known as Search Generative Experience or SGE, to users in the U.S.
While Google and its CEO Sundar Pichai continue to boast about the success of this feature, social media users have been criticizing it for suggesting strange solutions, such as putting glue on pizza to help the cheese stick. Google quickly removed these inaccurate results, but the damage was already done.
In a blog post on Thursday, Google’s head of search, Liz Reid, stated that AI Overviews have led to a “higher satisfaction” with the search results. She went on to attribute the inaccurate results to “data voids,” unusual queries, and the misinterpretation of web content by AI.
“In the last week, people on social media have shared some odd and erroneous overviews (along with a very large number of faked screenshots),” Reid stated in the blog post. She also said that, unlike other chatbots and LLMs, AI Overviews “generally don’t hallucinate or make things up.”
She then outlined Google’s plans to improve AI Overviews by limiting their appearance for “nonsensical” queries and satire. Moreover, the search giant has put in strong guardrails for “topics like news and health.”
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Why It Matters: The introduction of AI Overviews is the latest in a series of challenges for Google. The company has previously come under fire for the results generated by Google Gemini. At the time also, Google had to apologize and halt its image generation feature on Gemini.
Last month, Google parent Alphabet reported first-quarter revenue of $80.539 billion, a 15% year-over-year increase, surpassing the consensus estimate of $78.594 billion. The company also posted quarterly earnings of $1.89 per share, exceeding analyst expectations of $1.51 per share.
Alphabet has now surpassed analyst estimates for both revenue and earnings per share for five consecutive quarters, according to earnings data from Benzinga Pro.
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