Google’s AI-powered search generation experience (SGE) is getting a big new feature: it can summarize articles you read on the web. A Google blog post. SGE can already summarize search results for you so you don’t have to scroll forever to find what you’re looking for, and this new feature is designed to take that even further by helping you after you’ve clicked on a link.
You won’t see this feature right away, which Google calls “SGE while browsing.”
Google says it’s a new feature that’s starting to roll out on Tuesday as an “early experiment” in its Choice Labs program. (You’ll have access to SGE if you’ve already opted in, but if you haven’t, you can opt-in to the feature yourself.) It’s available first in the Google app on Android and iOS, and the company is bringing it to the Chrome browser on the desktop “in the coming days.”
If you have access to the Google app on mobile, Google will pull up a set of AI-generated “highlights” from an article after tapping the icon at the bottom of the screen. This feature is designed to work “only on articles freely available to the public on the Internet”; Google says it won’t work with websites that publishers mark as paywalled.
Google is making a few improvements to SGE. Google says that in SGE results for search queries about topics like science, economics and history, you can hover over specific terms to get definitions or maps about a topic. Google makes it easy to understand SGE’s summary of code information.
