TL;DR
- Google appears to be working on a way to expand AI Overviews with additional information.
- Selecting text from one AI Overview can prompt Google to create a new one focused on your selection.
- This only seems to work for Overview text, and not general Search results.
Have you come around to accepting the presence of AI-generated summaries in your search results? We saw Google introduce its AI Overviews in Search earlier this year, and while we’re sure many of you were scrambling to find ways to turn AI Overviews off, Google’s definitely been working to make the case for their utility. Today we’re checking out a new way to interact with AI Overviews that Google seems to be currently testing, letting you double-down on the AI analysis.
We’re checking out a tip from Eli_Blau on Telegram who shared with AA contributor Assemble Debug some interesting new behavior they spotted in version 15.45.33 beta of the Google app on a Pixel 7a. While getting an AI Overview at the top of your results is nothing new, Blau noticed that the app now lets you select a portion of that Overview to get further information on it — essentially, it’s pulling up a new AI Overview from within an existing one.
The functionality only seems to work with text in the Overview itself — you can’t just highlight any text on the results screen and run a second Overview this way. And before you get it into your head to follow this rabbit hole down to infinity with some Inception-style nested Overviews, the implement that we’ve checked out only supports one level deep of this re-querying.
Adding a feature like this makes enough sense, and we can appreciate the way the new results appear in a resizable card so that you can still read the original Overview. The one-level-deep limitation is also easy enough to understand, and if you still need more clarification at that point, you’re probably better off starting a new search.
Will you be giving this a try if Google ever gets around to making it available on your device? Or are you still avoiding AI-generated content wherever you can, and already wish we could roll the clock back a few years?
