Google Search Generative Experience adds About this result feature

Google today is adding its About this result feature to the AI-generated answers in the Search Generative Experience (SGE).

What it does. About this result is meant to “give people helpful context, such as a description of how SGE generated the response, so they can understand more about the underlying technology,” according to Google.

What it looks like. Here’s a GIF showing how this feature works:

In this example, the description says:

• “This overview was generated with the help of AI. It’s supported by info from across the web and Google’s Knowledge Graph, a collection of info about people, places and things. Generative AI is experimental and info quality may vary. For help evaluating content, you can visit the provided links.”

For individual links (soon). About this result will “soon” be added to individual links in Google SGE as well. Here, the purpose will be to give people more information about webpages that backup the SGE answers.

About About this result. Google launched About this result in Search in 2021. It was meant to help searchers learn more about a search result or search feature.

Why we care. While it’s felt like a struggle for Google to cite its sources in SGE and Bard, this highlighting of webpages and content seems like another positive step for highlighting the source from which Google is generating its AI answers.

Targeted improvements in SGE. Google is also working to reduce AI-powered responses that validate “false or offensive premises” in SGE. A “false premise” query is inaccurate or factually incorrect and something Google has worked to reduce in featured snippets. According to Google:

“We’re rolling out an update to help train the AI model to better detect these types of false or offensive premise queries, and respond with higher-quality, more accurate responses. We’re also working on solutions to use large language models to critique their own first draft responses on sensitive topics, and then rewrite them based on quality and safety principles. While we’ve built a range of protections into SGE and these represent meaningful improvements, there are known limitations to this technology, and we’ll continue to make progress.”

– Hema Budaraju, Google senior director, product management, Search / How we’re responsibly expanding access to generative AI in Search