• Google has announced that its AI Overviews feature is rolling out to six more countries.
• This is the same AI-powered feature which advised people in the US to eat rocks and put glue on pizza.
• AI Overviews is rolling out in both local languages and English for the six countries.

In May this year Google began testing out a new AI-powered feature in Search called AI Overviews. As the name suggested, it was designed to provide summaries of queries or more nuanced questions that users plugged into Search, with the results powered by the company’s large language models (LLMs).

Unfortunately the feature did not yield the results that users were expecting in some cases, with many taking to social media to share the puzzling answers that AI Overviews served up. One of the most notable was the suggestion of using glue in order to improve the tackiness of sauce on pizza, which is of course wrong, and if by some chance followed by someone making the query, potentially fatal.

While AI Overviews is far from perfect, it has not stopped Google in terms of expanded its rollout. Limited to the US alone in May, now three months later it is being rolled out to a further six countries –  the United Kingdom, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil.

Google adds that support for the feature will be made available in English, as well as a local language, but this will vary greatly depending on the country. In India for example, Hindi will be supported, but more than 780 languages are spoken there. As such, Google appears to be focusing on the most popular languages in terms of support for this feature for now.

“We’ll be rolling this expansion out gradually over the course of several weeks, with a focus on maintaining Search’s high bar for information quality. Through our testing in these markets, we’ve found that people prefer using Search with AI Overviews, and they find their search results more helpful,” Google explained in blog post.

“AI Overviews can open up new ways to search that were never possible before. Now, more people around the world can use Search to ask new kinds of questions, find the information they need even faster, and explore the best the web has to offer. As we continue to gather feedback and refine the experience, we look forward to bringing this to even more people around the world,” it added.

Whether this expansion of AI Overviews means the feature has been improved, remains to be seen, but we’re sure that if any odd results are generated, the internet will let people know.

Either way, launching the feature in countries like India, Brazil, and the UK will mean plenty more data voids or information gaps as Google terms them, will be unearthed.

[Image – Photo by The Nix Company on Unsplash]