Google Opens Limited Access to Its New AI-Based Generative Search

Google is opening up access to the AI-based Search Labs(Opens in a new window) experiments it announced at I/O, including the Search Generative Experience (SGE) that could upend traditional “blue link” search in the coming years.

If you already signed up to join the waitlist, Google will email you when access is granted. Otherwise, tap the Labs icon on Chrome(Opens in a new window) or the latest version of the Google app.

(Credit: Google/PCMag)

In addition to SGE, Google is also opening up access to Code Tips and Add to Sheets in the US. With Code Tips, you can ask for code-writing tips for a specific set of programming languages (C, C++, Go, Java, JavaScript, Kotlin, Python, TypeScript), tools (Docker, Git, shells), and algorithms. Add to Sheets, meanwhile, lets you insert search results into a spreadsheet.

SGE, however, may prove to be most disruptive to how we navigate the web today. This AI search experience pushes links to articles below the digital fold, summarizing the response to a search query up top as a conversational, ChatGPT-style paragraph. In theory, web searchers could get all the answers they need on the search results page; no need to click into the web pages from which SGE is pulling its answers.

Google says(Opens in a new window) SGE “will help you take some of the work out of searching, so you can understand a topic faster, uncover new viewpoints and insights and get things done more easily. So instead of asking a series of questions and piecing together that information yourself, Search now can do some of that heavy lifting for you.”

Users can ask follow-up questions, which triggers an AI-powered conversation mode.

“This experiment is our first step in adding generative AI to Search, and we’ll be making many updates and improvements over time,” the company says.